Thing #6: RSS Feeds

RSS, like Flickr, is yet another thing that a bunch of friends, plus my mom, have been blithely using for years, while I doggedly plod along manually (or manually-digitally) checking each individual site that I like whenever I get around to it. I have to admit that I like the idea of "visiting" different sites, rather than having them all streamed directly to me. While intellectually I understand the usefulness and efficiency of feeds, on a totally irrational level it feels more friendly and sociable to click over to the actual websites.

(NB: It feel pretty strange to have an "old-fashioned" way of visiting blogs already, when five or six years ago I didn't even know what one was!)

Anyway, this afternoon I finally got myself registered for both Bloglines and Google Reader, with some degree of success. Maybe because most of the sites I like to visit are blogs, I found Bloglines easier to use--Google Reader couldn't find a feed for one of my favorite kidlit blogs, A Fuse #8 Production, even when I pasted the URL right into the "subscribe" bar, while Bloglines turned it up right away.

Here is a link to my public subscriptions on Bloglines. I'm actually kind of a blog-reading addict, and have a much longer list of kidlit blogs that I check at least occasionally, but I'm starting out on Bloglines with just a few. Maybe I'll add to the list later, after see how this newfangled way of checking blogs suits me.

Thing #5: Flickr Mashups & Tools

Maybe it's the gloomy weather we've had this month, but I found myself drawn to the oranges when playing with the Flickr Color Pickr. Here's a screenshot of the brightest orange images I could find from the Urban Decay edition of this mashup:

In the original, you can click on each small boxed image to viewthe larger photo. All the ones I've looked at have been just stunning.

Another application I looked at was the Alphalearner, whose purpose is to "help children learn [the] English Alphabet through photos". The Alphalearner gives a taste of the terrific educational potential of social-networking sites like Flickr. It also illustrates some of the hazards of user-generated natural language tags. For examples of the latter, check out the photos displayed in Alphalearner's "D is for Donkey"--which seems to feature mostly human donkeys--and "Z is for Zebra" (there are some zebra-striped animals in there, but only a few actual zebras)

Thing #4: Flickr!

duct tape roses 11-07 007
Originally uploaded by elskushner

For years, friends have been hounding me to get a Flickr account, to no avail. Turns out, all it took was a few minutes on the Flickr and Yahoo! websites. Now all I have to do is remember my login, which is no small feat.

This photo was the first one I loaded onto my new Flickr account. I snapped it last fall when I was doing some teen programming and was promoting a duct tape crafts program. I also wanted a photo for my page on the NVDPL teen Facebook group that would represent me in some way, but not show my face.

I really like that one of the books in the photo is entitled "Things Not Seen"!

Thing #3: Posting to the NVDPL Training Blog

I just posted to the NVDPL Staff training blog, including a link to Shared Notes; my test post is here.

Thing #2: Test Post

O joy-- I get to blog for work! This is a test post for the NVDPL Playground program, based on the 23 Things program that several other libraries have run.

I have a couple of other blogs, but have created this one just for NVDPL Playground-related posts.

Okay-- over and out!