Delicious

Yesterday I couldn't get to grips with this at all, as I just couldn't work out how to install the bookmarklet. However, this morning it has proved very easy to add bookmarks by just entering the URL of the site, so I feel cheered by this. The only websites I use/know are very dull, but I duly bookmarked them, tagged them etc. I can appreciate the purpose of this, and was amazed by how fast the pages appeared when I clicked on them in Delicious. I have yet to send a bookmark to anyone though.
When I had a quick look at the Web 2.0 list for Oxford libraries (and bookmarked it) I was surprised by the number of things on it. Went on to St Hugh's and St Stephen's House things and came away from the former's Library Thing's page thinking yet again what a vast distraction such resources might be.

Finding Picnik was easy, as was connecting to my photos in Flickr so I could edit them. With my limited range of photos (3) and even more limited time, editing has been rather limited. I've cropped one photo, with good results, and put a strange tint on the one of the kitten so that has obviously been edited. It doesn't seem possible to zoom in on the kitten and save that shot, as I tried for ages and gave up. I'm simultaneously intrigued and horrified by the range of things one can do, especially the hideous kitschy frames, and the odd colour/light effects. I'm hoping to include one or two edited pics in this blog as evidence.

Photo finish

Uploading the few photos I could glean from e-mails proved to be much easier than opening the Yahoo account had been. This wasn't difficult but it WAS unwieldy and frustrating, and I was a bit vexed by the site's responses to my attempts to find an available ID - Phooey! The name .... is already taken (numerous times). Does anyone actually say Phooey!? And as for the fact that when I finally made it on to Flickr I was rewarded with 'Hola,{name}, now you know how to greet people in Spanish', well, that wasn't really the object of the exercise, was it? Leaving aside the fact that I already knew the expression thanks to the Spanish girls who kindly yelled 'hola, las bottas' when I was out in moon boots several years ago in Woodstock Road ...

So, I've managed to upload 3 very different photos to Flickr, and also explored geotabs and found a phenomenally good shot of Old Aberdeen High Street. I'm inspired to work out how to transfer my digital photos to the computer, but not right now as I'm falling dreadfully behind with 23 Things and everything else.

Thoughts on blogs

I've decided I love blogs - writing them, that is. Clearly it's the medium I've been waiting for all my life, but as a consequence I keep having to remind myself of security and privacy issues. It's too easy to blog away as if one were just thinking aloud.

As for other people's...I've had a look at some of the library blogs suggested by 23 Things, and I can now see the point of them. For news, up-to-date information and things not suited to notices (which people don't read anyway) this is obviously very suitable. Do readers look at them? Perhaps they do. I didn't know they existed until now, but then I'm not very up with technology. I wonder whether putting things on a blog lessens the need to answer the same basic questions again and again. For my own part, I was busy the other afternoon processing some very interesting books by African writers, and suddenly thought that a blog would be just the thing for announcing the arrival of particularly interesting items.

However, I still think that the temptation to spend hours more on-line blogging or reading blogs just for interest, in other words because they're there, is worrying.

more RSS feeds

In a desperate attempt to catch up, since I'm still on last week's Things, I followed a link from my googlereader page and subscribed to Cherwell (for the unofficial version of University life), and then remembering there is a feed from the University's homepage, to the News section on that. For both of these it was just a matter of clicking on boxes, so no cutting and pasting URL's. Then I was reading the BBC news (news junkie that I am!) and subscribed to the feed for the NE of Scotland. Why not? This was still child's play, as it were. so I shall really have to take a few minutes later and be more selective and imaginative, and find something that really involves setting a feed up the (slightly) harder way.

RSS feeds

Setting up the RSS feed to the 23Things blog was easy, because the instructions were very clear. When I got into Googlereader to do that, I realised that two RSS feeds were still there from when I went to the WISER session on 'Keeping up to date'last year sometime: two academic journals - this could be useful, if I ever have the time to get back to my own research. I feel as if I have therefore done the task about subscribing to other things, but I guess I will find new ones too, otherwise I won't know how to do it, will I?

addition to Things 1 and 2