#23 - Woohoo I did it!

This programme has been a fantastic experience. I have always been interested in Web 2.0 technology and having a programme with different applications for me to follow has been great. Although I had played around with blogs previously, participating in 23 Things has made me see outside the square and enabled me to challenge myself to get things done.

I had always thought that blog templates were pretty boring but thought that anyone using them was confined to what was offered. Playing with all the different applications made me think that there had to be a way to change things, so I had a go and managed to change the image for this blog, as well as the one for my personal blog.

I love looking at different programmes and applications that exist and trying to find uses for them at work and for my own self development. I now have a wiki for my department at work, as well as some ALIA committees I am on and have used Google Talk (as opposed to Google Chat) for meetings where members are in other states - cheaper than a teleconference (free!). I now use Google Reader for all my feeds and have found many more to add to my reader through 23 Things (like I didn't have enough before....) Flickr has been a great tool to use for sharing photos with my family and friends - I like the fact that I can make some public but have others private, namely family ones. Again, we are using an administration account in Flickr for a committee. Take a look here.

There were quite a few challenges, mainly IT restrictions at work, but I am sure there were many others with this issue. I was lucky that i was able to use the same user id when joining up to everything - makes it so much easier to remember!

I am really glad that I participated in this, as I found it very interesting and informative. Well done to the State Library of Victoria for implementing this programme across all public libraries and to Yarra Plenty Regional Library for facilitating it - job well done guys!

Uses for RSS readers

I like my google reader account - I have subscribed to many feeds and organised them into folders relating to their subject (am I cataloguing again???). I have one for marketing, one for libraries, one for scrapbooking, one for authors, one for teens - you get the picures. I have added some to my bloglines account - if you click on the picture of the book in the previous post, it will take you there.

I find using RSS so much simpler than having to regularly check any sites I have put in my 'favourites' - all I have to do is log into the one site and and new additions are there waiting for me to read!

For libraries - what a great way to be able to alert patrons if there are new books in the collection, or new journals added to a database. A different method of desktop delivery. Library Elf is also RSS enabled - bonus!

Week 4 - Bloglines vs Google Reader

I thought I would sign up for Google Reader too, to make the most of my acocunt. Bloglines is much faster to detect a feed than GR and has some fancier features.

I then found this post on Kathryn Greenhill's blog (go Kath!) - she says it so much better than me!

Week 4 - RSS feeds

I love the idea of RSS feeds!!! It was OK to add sites I liked to my 'favourites' but that meant I had to keep remembering to check if there were any updates, and sometimes the updates wouldn't be obvious from the homepage of the site. It also meant that I couldn't check for updates from other computers, unless I remembered the URLs, as favourites are only specific to the machine you are working on (unless there is some other way to share them, short of networking 2 or more PCs).

I did dabble with RSS over 12 months ago, using SharpReader - this is a client that I downloaded to my laptop that I would put the RSS feeds into and it would regularly check for updates. At the time, not many sites were RSS enabled, so the content of SharpReader was a bit limited. I also would forget to open it, so it was starting to get a bit pointless.

I love the idea of a web based reader, because I can access my account anywhere to check for new feeds. Great way to keep up with what is happening.

I have subscribed to 20 different feeds!! I think I'll add some of my favourite blogs to my blogroll. I organised them in different folders so I can read what subject I feel like at the time. It could be library stuff, scrapbooking stuff, Web 2.0 stuff.... I think I'll have a play with Google Reader too. That way I can use the same google account!

I just discovered something really nifty - if i do a spell check, I can double click on the 'unknown' word (or the typo, if that is what it is :-) ) and it will give me a selection to choose from. Cool.