Left Overs

No, I'm not talking about food...I'm talking about bits and pieces that I thought I've done, but apparently not.

OK…so, on to the last bit of week 3’s lesson. I haven’t done it yet and don’t really know what it’s about. No wait…I did do it quickly early last week. But heck…that was a week ago and I got really sick that week. In fact, I had to take Friday and Saturday off, and I already had Wednesday and Thursday off already as they were my normal days off. So basically, all that week, I was high on meds and vitamin C. Let me have a look at my drawer and see if I wrote any of the passwords down. Yep…got it. So, let’s have a look at what I did. I’m just going to log on, and see…ok, yep yep. Apparently, I had actually done it already, but I hadn’t blogged about it. It was pretty easy to set up. I did 2 book searchrolls by mistake…so I had to name one of them Books and the other My Books. Oh well. But then…I read that I had to link my searchroll to my blog. But where were the instructions…well lookee here. It’s under the instructions called “optional”, now, I don’t know about you, but to me, optional means, you don’t have to do it if you don’t want to. Over here, it means that you have to do it. Why? Why I ask you??! .

so, let me read the instructions and have a go at it. OMG, the instructions are so confusing. I guess it’s because they have to have a generic instruction for everyone and everyone’s bloggs (hey is the plural of blog “bloggs” or is it “blogs”?). Anyway, some of the words were different and at one point, I got lost with the adding the page element, luckily someone pointed it out to me, so I was able to head off again in the right direction. And yes, once there, I was able to follow the instructions and added the code. Viola! The rollyo searchroll turned up in my blog!! (see, look, its at the right hand side of the post that you're reading now!) Yippeeee!! I’m so happy!! He he he!! Ok, smug time over. I better log off and go back to work!

Eye Candy

So, one of my friends gave me a pic of Keanu that she had done for one of the image generator thingy. But unfortunately, she’d saved it to another library’s hard drive and it did not load to her blog properly. By the time she found out about the mistake, she couldn’t find it on the desktop anymore, so she had to find a less interesting subject (I mean, you just can’t top the pic of Keanu…where else do you do from here but down?...as Newweb2 (a.k.a. webmum) and her friend catatonia (a.k.a. catatonic-chataholic) were saying when they were doing this exercise...playing around with the picture… “you just can’t improve on perfection itself!” (I’m going to have to agree on that one!). So here’s the pic of Keanu, given to me by webmum! Thanks!

Apparently, I’ve also missed writing about the search engines you can use to search for your favourite feeds. So I went back to week 2 and lo and behold! I did miss it! (oooppss!) So, I spent the next five minutes speed reading through the thing, decided couldn’t be really bothered and just started clicking away on the links. Now, syndic8 was blocked my Manukau (surprise surprise), so I licked..I mean clicked on the next one, which happened to be technorati. Meh…didn’t look that flash to me, but I did find one topic I liked, so fiddled around with it and found a site which I added to my rss feeds. This was the site by slashfilm.com. The bloggs there were very entertaining!! Well, at least I completed week 2’s exercise! :) Sweet.

LibraryThing

Well, I woke up extra early this morning to see if the computer would play nice with me and actually let me do some Web 2.0 stuff without dying on me.

Hey...it must love cold early mornings cause it worked! It is cold, it is pouring down with rain and in a few minutes, I have to go out and go to work.

The good new is, I got to play around and set up my LibraryThing.

And you know what? It is actually very fun to use! I wonder why I haven't used this before. Its pretty amazing and so easy to use. Hell...it even gives you a virtual tour of the place if you don't know what its about. All you have to do is sign up (which everyone doing this web 2.0 exercise should be familiar with, seeing as we've been signing up left, right and centre since we started this!) and viola! you've got an account. After that, you just search for you fave book title or author, click and it is added to your library. It is even easier than searching for a book through Millennium!! (he he he!).

Well people, here's my link to my librarything:

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/Young-Padawan

Wk 3

Right, so here we are with week 3. Glad to say I'm not dead yet, but I sure hope that this will be easier than last week. Last week's lesson on RSS feeds - not so happy with it. It was loooonnngggg.....plus if you are not familiar with any of it, also very confusing.

The slow computer connection did not help at all. The the most frustating bit was that the work computers blocked most of the sites, even if you were on the Learn.net. So I have no idea how they expect us to do this at work, if the work computers aren't even cooperating.

Here I go again, trying to do this at home. Hope it's good.

So this week, we are going to be playing around with image generators. Its supposed to be fun, but at the moment, I'm so pressed for time, I don't have time to play around.

The one I'm looking at is the Star Wars Crawl (gee....I wonder why?!!).

Except that when I clicked on it, I found out that the site was shut down. Back to square one.

Instead I clicked on the Magnigraph link where I can " create your own vector images in black, white, red or blue". So I did. Got a picture of my fellow jedis and stuck in, it worked after about 3 tries! Hey, at least it worked!

So there you are. You can see my very red magnigraph. Well...its late and its cold. I've been at this for more than an hour now. The computer is so slow. I'll try to pick this up again tomorrow.

Part Deux

So now I'm home, wishing I was doing something, anything other than this. .

OK....so I've done the discovery exercise of adding the 10 feeds onto my blogline account.

I've even subscribed to some co-workers feeds....some are really entertaining to read!

Now I'm tackling the last part of this exercise, which is..hmm...something about a public blogline URL. Let me see. OK, here goes!

Let's see...if I've done everything right, here is the URL for my public blog thingy:

http://www.bloglines.com/public/Young-Padawan


Victory is mine! It works! Ha ha! The hard part is over, so now I can cruise over to lesson 3!

SSR (silent sustained reading)....err...I mean RSS (really simple syndication - not)

So here we are with lesson two.

Apparently this RSS thing is supposed to be the hardest one of the whole lot.

I've been hearing horror stories of people tearing their hair out with frustration about it, the link wouldn't work, or the webmarshall would block the sites and dozens of other little things that's making this RSS thing really hard.

I had to ask for help with this. Good thing she knew what she was on about, she was able to steer me in the right direction and I sort of got the hang of it. It was a bit hard with the computer playing up on you, it either wouldn't accept the sites I was trying to subscibe to (sorry access denied) or the whole page would suddenly come up in code (matrix anyone?).

Basically after an hour of fiddling with the computer's temper tantrums and in between customer service, I got as far as making a blogline account and signing up to the 10 mandatory feeds we were supposed to have (did I mentioned that the computer connection this morning was agonizingly slow? I swear, empires have risen and fallen in the time it took for the page to load up). And that was the only free time I had with the computer today, so I've decided to take this puppy home and see what I can come up with for the second part of this RSS feeds.

The beginning of the end

I don’t quite know what to make of this. The whole blogging business. I knew it existed…I’ve even read a few random ones, but I wasn’t really keen on getting into the whole thing myself.

Well…that stops now. I’ve broken one of my items from the “NOT TO DO LIST” because work asked me to.

I work in a library (read = geek).

Apparently, we (all library staff) have to catch up with the modern times and start learning web 2.0 stuff.

So now, I’ve got all these jargon and technical terminology…some of which I’ve never even heard of coming out of my ears..like….RSS & Newsreaders, folksonomies and technorati…. what???? are those even real words?

Well…however this goes, it sure will be an interesting journey...