Wednesday, February 11, 2009

The Ning

Thursday, February 5, 2009

More Things on a Stick, Thing 26

I enjoyed this one. I joined the Ning; I uploaded photos; I joined the CMLE Central Perk Group; and I replied to a discussion question in the group.

I joined the 23 Things on a Stick Ning in Round 2 a.k.a. this round. I started out using the Ning like I would a regular social networking site. But when I joined the group, CMLE Central Perk, I liked that people were saying: I'm so and so from such and such library. This will help me at work in CMLE. Now when people call or e-mail, I can somewhat put a face to name.

I don't think that I could use this in my personal life. It reminds me a lot of Facebook which I use the most. I think, however, this would be nice for CMLE to have. We could have a group with discussion, and I could see what our media specialists and librarians look like.

See you around for Thing 27!:)

IMPORTANT LINKS:
http://morethingsonastick.pbwiki.com/
http://morethingsonastick.pbwiki.com/Thing-26-Join-the-23-Things-On-a-Stick-Ning

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

More Things on a Stick, Thing 25

Okay, so bare with me; I've been doing Thing 25 over the past few days so it may take me a while to remember everything I did.

So, I attempted to make my blog talk, but in the end it didn't work out. I tried using Vozme, but that was just to weird for me. Talkr worked out in the beginning, but again it turned out to be weird. I had high hopes for Spoken Text, but it just took too long for everything to load. And I was being a little impatient at the time. Odiogo and Gabcast didn't really enthrall me, so I didn't use them.

I added a commenting tool! I added disqus, because it was either mentioned in an article or one of the videos, so I thought I would give it a try. So far I like it. It also sends the comments right to my e-mail, so I don't have to check my blog every time.

I tried out Sitemeter which is a statistics collector. It's alright. I may get rid of it. It e-mails me on occasion to update me on my stats. Right now, I have none. Sad.:( I'm thing of getting rid of it over the fact that my blog is not a high volume blog, and therefore, I don't need the stats to see what is going on.

I used the photo tool, PIXresizer, to resize some photos. That program seemed way too easy. It was easy, because you uploaded a photo; hit the resize button, the picture resized itself, and it saved to your computer. I didn't like it, because I couldn't give it the size that I wanted the photo at, and it seemed iffy that a photo resizer on the Internet could save the resized photo to the actual folder it was located at on my computer. I checked though; the resized photo saved as the original. I give this photo props for being able to do that.

Originally, in my blog, I had slideshare in as a widget on my sidebar with six photos in it. That program was user friendly, plus it was convenient that blogger already had it as a widget or "gadget." Slideshare was replaced by Picture Trail as soon as I got my hands on that program. That slideshow tool is SWEET! I used the same six photos that I used with slideshare accept I totally go to pimp out the photos plus create a background. See the below blog for the final product. I loved that Picture Trail was interconnected with blogger. That makes things flow so much better. I originally placed Picture Trail in my sidebar, but the pictures were being cut off and that is why it is in the blog below. You can see all of the slideshow.

I did not use any of the polls or quizs, because I felt I had done enough for Thing 25. But I could see myself using them in the blog at a later date. I didn't use SnapShots or Apture either. I maybe could see myself using SnapShots though, because I like the fact that it gives a kind of preview of links and things.

I did, however, add a Search Box with Blog Buster. The videos that were included with Thing 25 talked a lot about a widget called Technorati. I was going to add that widget to the sidebar of my blog but then I noticed that there was something similar to that. I this feature a lot, because it makes finding certain things in a blog easier for the blog users.

I didn't add any of the social networking tools either. I did think that it was cool that you could have a chat box in your sidebar, but I use my AIM and Windows Live Messager about once a year, so it didn't appeal to me that much.

I can, honestly, say that I spent way too much time on Thing 25. And I think that was for two reasons: 1) I was either really into the different tools to add in my blog and 2) some of the things (i.e. Spoken Text) were slightly frustrating.

See you all around for Thing 26! :)

IMPORTANT LINKS:
http://morethingsonastick.pbwiki.com/
http://morethingsonastick.pbwiki.com/Thing-25-Bloggers-Toolkit