Good afternoon, all.
A final conundrum with RSS feeds ... when I tried to create a subscription to Bloglines from Your Tutor I was assured no feeds could be detected but an update just occurred to my errant Internet Explorer feed from Your Tutor .....??????
I have just made a minor edit on the Wikipedia entry for Grenfell, New South Wales (added 'cyclist Reggie "IronMan" McNamara' to the paragraph mentioning tennis player Jan Lehane and cricketer Stan McCabe) and made two suggestions on the related talk page - well, actually set up a related talk page and then made two suggestions.
I never did get round to loading photos onto Flickr but I feel now is the right time to consider myself as having met all the basic requirements of the course and completed a few of the Adventure options.
So, Adieu and a big thank you to all involved in the Web 2.0 course from Itnitwit.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
The end of the (RSS) feed-ing frenzy .....
Good morning, all.
I enjoyed Ellen's comment that I seemed to be having a "very interesting time exploring RSS" - what a broad application that word 'interesting' can have ....
The good news is that on the third attempt I got feeds to appear in Bloglines - was easy once I included the vital step of setting up a "Sub with Bloglines" in Favourites. I set up the following feeds
ABS Blog for Librarians (10) (0)
FOLK AUSTRALIA (10) (0)
NEWS.com.au | Africa (10) (0)
Powerhouse Museum - Photo of the Day (10) (0)
Tag: Diabetes - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) (10)
I tried to set up a feed to the Lonely Planet podcast and videocast but got an 'unspecified error' message so maybe this hardware could not cope with that.
RSS feeds are certainly a great timesaver at an individual level and would be very relevant in a specialist library or in professional development.
I can't see me using RSS feeds in my work unless I got a sudden urge to become more involved in the theory of the profession and needed to be au fait with professional material and posts.
I must confess I didn't really go hunting other library blogs ....
I tried very hard to set up a news feed to this post. There are items showing up but I don't know whether it will automatically update as I would have thought it should .. Anyway I tried!! (the story of my involvement in this course ..!!!)
I enjoyed Ellen's comment that I seemed to be having a "very interesting time exploring RSS" - what a broad application that word 'interesting' can have ....
The good news is that on the third attempt I got feeds to appear in Bloglines - was easy once I included the vital step of setting up a "Sub with Bloglines" in Favourites. I set up the following feeds
ABS Blog for Librarians (10) (0)
FOLK AUSTRALIA (10) (0)
NEWS.com.au | Africa (10) (0)
Powerhouse Museum - Photo of the Day (10) (0)
Tag: Diabetes - ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) (10)
I tried to set up a feed to the Lonely Planet podcast and videocast but got an 'unspecified error' message so maybe this hardware could not cope with that.
RSS feeds are certainly a great timesaver at an individual level and would be very relevant in a specialist library or in professional development.
I can't see me using RSS feeds in my work unless I got a sudden urge to become more involved in the theory of the profession and needed to be au fait with professional material and posts.
I must confess I didn't really go hunting other library blogs ....
I tried very hard to set up a news feed to this post. There are items showing up but I don't know whether it will automatically update as I would have thought it should .. Anyway I tried!! (the story of my involvement in this course ..!!!)
Monday, May 5, 2008
Stewing with RSS feeds
My instinct was that RSS feeds would be bad news and what do they say about trusting one's instincts?!!
I have the account in Bloglines - that was an easy entree - and have managed to get the feed from the Powerhouse Museum's picture of the day - has turned up for twenty days. But I don't really know why - I click on 'subscribe' but am not asked to put in a destination so I can't conceive how the connection occurs unless the fact that I have an open Bloglines account is enough. But I suspect it is just within the computer, not going through Bloglines because when I look at my feeds on Bloglines it says I have one feed but I can't open it from there .. and I presume I should be able to?? But on the other hand I set up the initial feed on the CTC computer but it is showing up on the library computer which suggests it isn't just within the computer ... So if what I did was right it is very easy but it just seems to be too easy .... (But I am ITnitwit!!!!!)
I still have to find four more sites from which to set up feeds. But the general comments ... I can see RSS feeds being wonderful time savers for individuals and for specialist libraries who could nominate a single figure number of really useful websites/blogs. No more having to trawl those sites at regular intervals checking for the new material. But for the generalist library RSS feeds would be most useful for staff tapping into relevant professional sites rather than as a service for clients as it would be very hard to know which sites to connect to. They would also be a useful topic for a small group instruction module, providing a real service and again positioning the library as relevant and 'techno-savvy'. (I'm not sure how much the CTC manager knows about RSS feeds ....)
As someone else commented, it was hard to find suitable sites from which to set up feeds. I tried a few way-out things like African cooking and Iceland looking at websites rather than blogs but I assume if you click on the RSS logo (on the menu bar, not within the window) and it says no feeds detected, you can't set up feeds. I found an RSS logo on the diabetes section of healthinsite.gov.au/topics but coudn't get the feed to work. Also I couldn't get a feed set up from Annabel Crabbe's blog on the Herald site. When I clicked on the RSS icon the screen went back to general news. So all in all not quite an unmitigated disaster but not a real success either ....
I have the account in Bloglines - that was an easy entree - and have managed to get the feed from the Powerhouse Museum's picture of the day - has turned up for twenty days. But I don't really know why - I click on 'subscribe' but am not asked to put in a destination so I can't conceive how the connection occurs unless the fact that I have an open Bloglines account is enough. But I suspect it is just within the computer, not going through Bloglines because when I look at my feeds on Bloglines it says I have one feed but I can't open it from there .. and I presume I should be able to?? But on the other hand I set up the initial feed on the CTC computer but it is showing up on the library computer which suggests it isn't just within the computer ... So if what I did was right it is very easy but it just seems to be too easy .... (But I am ITnitwit!!!!!)
I still have to find four more sites from which to set up feeds. But the general comments ... I can see RSS feeds being wonderful time savers for individuals and for specialist libraries who could nominate a single figure number of really useful websites/blogs. No more having to trawl those sites at regular intervals checking for the new material. But for the generalist library RSS feeds would be most useful for staff tapping into relevant professional sites rather than as a service for clients as it would be very hard to know which sites to connect to. They would also be a useful topic for a small group instruction module, providing a real service and again positioning the library as relevant and 'techno-savvy'. (I'm not sure how much the CTC manager knows about RSS feeds ....)
As someone else commented, it was hard to find suitable sites from which to set up feeds. I tried a few way-out things like African cooking and Iceland looking at websites rather than blogs but I assume if you click on the RSS logo (on the menu bar, not within the window) and it says no feeds detected, you can't set up feeds. I found an RSS logo on the diabetes section of healthinsite.gov.au/topics but coudn't get the feed to work. Also I couldn't get a feed set up from Annabel Crabbe's blog on the Herald site. When I clicked on the RSS icon the screen went back to general news. So all in all not quite an unmitigated disaster but not a real success either ....
Getting 'thingy' about LibraryThing
Good morning, all.
I doubt that anyone will follow it up but I did include the following in a recent Library Lines column in the local newspaper .....
Last week as part of THAT course I ......and discovered LibraryThing ...
LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com/) is ideal for people who love reading books AND love doing things on their computer. I would describe it as a cross between a huge library catalogue (contains over 25 million books) and a humungous book club. LibrayThing is an online sevice to help people catalogue their books easily and because everyone catalogues together, LibraryThing also connects people with the same books, comes up with suggestions for what to read next, and so forth. There are a large number of groups you can join, and at 'Talk' contribute to various conversations on book-related themes. Not surprisingly the largest group numerically is "Librarians who Library Thing" and my favourite topic in their Group Talks is "Funny Requests from Patrons" - it's a scream!
Click on any title and you will find ecommendations of similar books, member reviews and current related conversation topics.
LibraryThing uses the profile of the books you have entered to suggest books you might like to read (and even ones you wouldn't!). Once you have entered your books you can search them, sort them and add subject 'tags' or labels, also rate them, e.g. 4 stars, and write reviews.
Why not explore LibraryThing for yourself ..."
I doubt that anyone will follow it up but I did include the following in a recent Library Lines column in the local newspaper .....
Last week as part of THAT course I ......and discovered LibraryThing ...
LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com/) is ideal for people who love reading books AND love doing things on their computer. I would describe it as a cross between a huge library catalogue (contains over 25 million books) and a humungous book club. LibrayThing is an online sevice to help people catalogue their books easily and because everyone catalogues together, LibraryThing also connects people with the same books, comes up with suggestions for what to read next, and so forth. There are a large number of groups you can join, and at 'Talk' contribute to various conversations on book-related themes. Not surprisingly the largest group numerically is "Librarians who Library Thing" and my favourite topic in their Group Talks is "Funny Requests from Patrons" - it's a scream!
Click on any title and you will find ecommendations of similar books, member reviews and current related conversation topics.
LibraryThing uses the profile of the books you have entered to suggest books you might like to read (and even ones you wouldn't!). Once you have entered your books you can search them, sort them and add subject 'tags' or labels, also rate them, e.g. 4 stars, and write reviews.
Why not explore LibraryThing for yourself ..."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
