Thing #12 - Rollyo

Select...Crochet infoSearch The Web

Looking for crochet patterns or instructions? Use the custom search engine above to search seven crochet websites! My preferred sites are Lion Brand Yarn and Ravelry, but a search engine isn't very comprehensive with only two sites, so I added a few more. Some of them I'm familiar with, others I haven't used as often, but they are a wealth of information. I wanted to include Crochetville, but it's a discussion forum and I wasn't sure how that would work in a search engine. Another good source for instructinal videos is You Tube. You can easily search for a particular stitch and find a demonstration to help you along.

Thing #10 - Image Generators

This mini READ poster was made using ALA's image generator. I wish it would give you the option of resizing your photo, like you can do on Ravelry. Then you'd be able to see that my son is reading his first year scrapbook. Seeing how he's 5 now, it'd be nice if he could read his 1-5 year album, but I would have to create that first...

Using yet another Big Huge Labs app, called Motivator, I created this "motivational" poster with a picture from my children's 5th birthday party two weekends ago. Not quite as clever as Barney's motivational posters, but still kind of fun.

Also from Big Huge Labs comes this fun jigsaw puzzle maker! Made with my most recently made elephant amigurumi, you can also order actual puzzles from the website. That would be a great gift for family and young friends, especially if they are featured in the photo.

Thing #11 - Goodreads

Well, for this Thing, we're supposed to sign up and explore Goodreads. It looks like a great app that shows what you're reading and will update your friends with the info. I've seen it on a couple of blogs, but, I don't really think it's for me. I'll admit, I can be a girl of a hundred lists, but I'm decidedly 1.0 about it. I tried using Remember the Milk, even integrating it with my gmail, but I gave up on it after a couple of weeks. I prefer to keep lists on paper.

As for books, I keep an Excel file listing the books I've read, when I read them, a rating (1-5), and notes about the book. I can tell you that my reading always slows down towards the end of the summer - I'll go from reading 3-5 books a month, to one or even none. No, it's not very social, as the list lives on my flash drive, but I'm not sure that anyone else would really be interested in my reading choices. I also keep a list of books I own on LibraryThing. Ok, ok, I haven't used my LT account in a while, and the books skew heavily towards anthropology and Latino writers. I essentially quit buying books when I started working for the library. :)

There are so many social networking sites online, I simply don't have time to keep up with all of them. I've resisted joining Facebook, and only set up a MySpace page so I could help the teens fix up their pages. I have a Twitter account that I use, sparingly, am an active newbie on Ravelry, a long time lurker on a couple of scrapbooking sites, and have a LinkedIn account that I check every so often. I just don't have the time to be active on all those sites, much less to add any more!

Thing #9 - RSS Feeds

As a lot of people have expressed, I think I'm at my limit of subscribed feeds. It's hard to catch up if I skip a weekend of reading, so I'm not keen on adding more. However, there's a lot of cool stuff you can do with feeds. If you take a look at the sidebar at the right, I've added a clip of the feeds I have filed under "Librariana". That's just a small view of some of the library-related blogs I read. Reader also allows you to make a webpage of individual folders. Here's one for what I call "Personal Development" which is mostly blogs on personal finance and productivity sites. I don't want to clutter the sidebar, but you can also add a "blogroll" to your site. Since blogger is a Google product, it's super simple to add these things to your blogger-hosted blog.

History Making

Wednesday, November 05, 2008: 714 front pages from 66 countries. Cool.

Thing #7 - About Technology

So, I've been mulling over a topic I wanted to blog about. A few years ago, I read an article (with so many feeds and websites, who knows where I read it) about how MySpace was starting to lose ground to specialized social network sites. I don't remember the article too clearly, but I do remember thinking: I wonder how long that will take to trickle down to our everyday users? It had to have been about three years ago, but we still haven't seen a decline in the number of people using our computers to access MySpace! Without that article to point to as the premise, the rest of it's no good. I wanted to talk about trendspotting, access, and how the "digital divide" still exists, despite the access to computers we provide.

Instead, let's talk about white space. If we get to the point where there's free broadband wifi, I'll definitely have to get an iPod Touch, or a netbook, or some sort of new device that is sure to be out soon. With as many people as we get who come in with their wifi ready laptops, can you image how much demand there will be for this new access? For much less than a laptop, you could pull an internet connect from just about anywhere. How cool would that be?

Thing #8 - RSS

Before I started using an aggregator service, I used to spend a lot of time trying to remember all the websites and blogs I liked to read. I had a huge list of bookmarked sites and I'd spend a lot of time visiting sites that hadn't been updated since my last visit. When I started seeing that little orange square with the radiating white lines and started reading about RSS and aggregators, I jumped in and signed up on Bloglines. How convenient to have all my sites updated, in one place, just waiting for me to read! My "sites I read list" kept getting longer and longer, but it wasn't a problem to keep up with them. I even suggested the aggregator to co-workers.

After a while, though, Bloglines started having these weird hiccups, where it wouldn't update feeds for a few days, then all the posts would come thru at once. That wasn't too bad with moderate posters, but with a site like kottke.org, I'd be overwhelmed with the backlog of posts! I had heard about Google's Reader, but when I tried it out, I didn't like it as much as Bloglines. I already used Gmail and Google Docs, and mostly turned to Google for general searching. I didn't like how central Google was becoming to my online activities. If Bloglines hadn't had so many problems, I would never have switched.

Thankfully, after a couple of weeks of using Reader, I really started to like it! I like how my Gmail address book is integrated, it makes it super easy to send finds like this to friends:


The other cool thing about Reader is the Share/Share with note function. Instead of emailing your friends the funny link, you can "share" it. It's mostly functional for your friends who also use Reader (helps spread the love), but it also creates a webpage with your shared posts. The Discover feature is good, too. It looks at the blogs you read and suggests others on the same topic. I've found it's sort of hit or miss, but, I think most blogs are like that too.