Week #5 - Online Image Generator

When I saw the picture for the week's task I was so impressed. I thought that acl eLGAR had managed to finagle one of the Real staff into making a coffee with 'ACL Learn 2.0' on it... I am mightily impressed with the generators. And a little embarrassed that I was fooled SO EASILY...

My favourites were the Customised smilies Not a terribly good example on the homepage, but they turn out pretty well when they're a bit smaller.

This one was supposed to be a superhero but I don't think superheroes are supposed to look that whiny...


The jigsaw one is pretty great too. Rawr

Week #4 - Library Blogs/newsfeeds

I came across something truly amazing on the weekend... A library school reading that I really enjoyed! I wanted to read it! It was written in English! Not Libraryspeak! And considering that it was about digitizing library collections, that was quite an accomplishment! Considering the fact that Blog Fever has run RAMPANT in the 2.0 world I hoped that he might be blogging. I've not been able to find one though :( There are several articles on other blogs and conference programmes but no personal blog.

Library school has been a pretty good source of blogs and journals though. The LITA blog is pretty nifty with its conference recordings and separation of RSS feeds into entries, comments or both. The Bloglines search tool looked a little messy, but I liked that they included when the blog was last updated in the search results. I came across a few interesting looking ones that hadn't been updated in months before seeing that they included the last updated date. Better to check that first than be disappointed :P

I have an atavistic aversion to using Blogs to find out information in any field other than entertainment, but some of the library blogs are managing to counter that. *twitch* I still can't imagine referencing a blog in an essay, but maybe that will change.

Week #4 - RSS

Oye, I am horribly behind with Library 2.0... In my defense... no, I have no defense :D I'm just slack.

RSS is pretty nifty though. I didn't really use it until we upgraded to Explorer 7 though. We covered RSS in library school and a Learned Colleague talked about his RSS feeds before that (which I would nod along wisely to but have nooo idea what it really meant at the time..) but I never got around to signing up with a reader. The built-in reader with Explorer 7 is great though; it's as easy as adding something to your favourites and there's no password or account name required. I signed up to several blogs and cheered with geeky glee whenever I saw the little RSS icon on a news *coughtrashyentertainment* page I liked. The only downside was that it was bound to my computer at home, so when we started Library 2.0-ing at work I created an account with Google Reader. It works in pretty much the same way that bloglines does when you want to add subscriptions but it looks niftier and doesn't include the word 'blog' in the title. (Reeeeally don't like that word.. it's almost as ugly as 'pulchritude'. Blech... and badoom chish!)

I must confess though. I got bored with RSS. And stopped checking Google Reader, and my Explorer 7 version. I missed the shiny personalised versions of the original websites/blogs. If I were using it to read summaries of news items, or newly received books at the library (hint hint) I'd probably keep up with it more, but most of the blogs/websites I subscribed to were the kind of ones that you want to read the whole article/entry, not just briefly scan and move along.

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