Online Image Generators. Or, I've done too many Things today and can't think of any more catchy titles.

I didn't look at the whole list of 23Things before I started this venture. It seems that as I go down the list, the things are getting to be less useful in the real world. It's nice to know these things are possible, but how much time should one spend on these "extras"?

In the real world, would you say, "Gee, I need to make a poster/picture/logo. Let me go online and see if there are some cool tools that I can use?" Or would you just go to Word, Publisher, or another program that you're well-versed in and patch something together even though it's not the newest or coolest idea ever seen?

I suppose there will be times when we'll want to show that we're with the times and can do some cool stuff. But to do them just for the sake of saying we can seems to be rather useless. It reminds me a little of classrooms 15-20 years ago where we said we had to have a computer in ever classroom even though many teachers had no idea what to do with those computers. So they came up with things to do on the computer, even though the wasn't as real as it might have been without the computer.

On the other hand, if the computers had not been put in the classrooms, the better technology uses that we have now would probably not have come about. So maybe all these "fun" things will end up being useful in the future. Only time will tell.

Off to publish this post and see where my "no peanuts" lunchbag showed up when I sent it directly from ImageChef. My little food allergy guy will think that's pretty cool.

It didn't automatically post, so I'm back to cutting and pasting code.

More Flickr Fun. Or is it?

After my last "thing" was pretty unsuccessful, I'm hesitant to continue on with Flickr, but I'll give it a whirl. If I don't try, I can't succeed, so I might as well at least try a little.

The color generator is kind of interesting, but I don't know how useful it is. Since this is a photo sharing site, are we allowed to copy others' photos and use them? (I had thought the color thing could pull up some interesting avatar pictures, but I don't want to steal someone else's work.) What are the rules for these things that are posted for all the world to see, and can be easily copied?

Next stop, the BigHugeLabs Framer. This is actually kind of interesting, but I hit another brick wall. This time, my Flickr account was easily linked and the program worked well with the Flickr photos. But the picture I really wanted to try was in my Photobucket account, and it failed to upload or connect or whatever it has to do. I really don't want to be uploading photos to multiple sites, so it would be nice if I could get one to work consistently for several different purposes.

I can see the palette generator being useful with scrapbooking, to choose a theme and/or background papers to use. I've always been doing this manually, but I'm sure I'm missing some good color combinations.

The Spell with Flickr thing is neat. I can think of some fun things to do with it, but for now I'll just show off this:



Fun, yes. Useful, maybe? It's good to be aware that these things are out there, because it seems that too often I'm thinking, "There should be a way to do this." Now I'll know a few more of the possibilities.

Flickr and Dropshots and Photobucket, Oh My!

Online photo sharing is not new to me. My brother introduced me to Dropshots.com several years ago and it's what our family uses to share photos. That site is password protected, and I paid for a "premium" account, so I've got a lot of pictures there. I've found that I'm using it less and less, however, as either no one's looking at my photos, or they just don't leave comments. I don't like putting things out there if no one's going to look at them. On the other hand, my sister-in-law's family has a great network and they leave lots of feedback for each other. It's more fun that way.

I also use Photobucket.com for public posts, such as Internet message boards and my Travels with Children blog. It is not password-protected, includes no identifying information, and I've tried really hard to keep all the pictures there very anonymous, including not showing my kids' faces in any photos.

I don't have qualms about using the Internet for most anything, but I really do try to protect our privacy, especially that of our children. They have enough to worry about without their mom putting pictures of them on the Internet for all the world to see, steal, and alter.

Any photos I post to my Flickr account will also be very anonymous. If I can get Flickr to integrate with either Blogger or Wordpress, I'll try it out for adding blog photos, but for now, Photobucket works well so I'm not too eager to switch horses midstream. I do like Flickr's easy tag-adding but that's the only real benefit I've seen to it compared to the other sites I've used.

Am I the only one who's just a little disconcerted about the amount of detail available about my photos? Not only is the type of camera shown, but the aperture, date and time, and resolution. I suppose for serious photographers this information is relevant, but for my snapshot life I'd rather have an option to repress that information.

Hey, at least Blogger tries to brighten my spirits.

My frustration post without the flickr pictures was met with "Your blog post published successfully!"

At least I accomplished something. For about 2 seconds.

This post's response to the "publish" button was. ERROR: Your request could not be processed. Please try again.

Will I ever complete Thing4? I'm not so sure at this point.

Flickr. It's not everything I wished it would be.

First of all, the assignment was to take pictures, add them to Flickr, tag them appropriately, and add them to the blog. If you see photos below, I was successful at that part.

OK, so you don't see them yet, do you? The "automated" way of setting up the Blogger account in Flickr makes no sense.

So, here's the process:
Head to google.com and if you aren't already logged in you'll be asked to do so.
On the page you end up on, you need to "Grant Access" to flickr.com.
Return to Flickr, finish setting things up

Yeah, that makes no sense. I'm logged into google but I don't know what page I'm supposed to end up on, or how to grant access. Grrrrrrr.

Let's try this the old-fashioned way, by copying and pasting the url's of the photos from Flickr into the photo-adding tool in Blogger.

As you see, it put some blank pictures in my post, and it didn't put them where I wanted them, just above this post.

Time to get really ancient and attempt it using html.

That's not working either.

Let's try a picture from Photobucket.


As you can see that one worked. Photobucket provides several different lines of code, which are easily copied and pasted into a post. It looks like the Flickr-Google-Blogger thing would be great. If it worked.

If anyone has tips on getting it to work (like which page exactly I'm supposed to end up on, and how to grant access to it), a comment to this post would be much appreciated.

Until then, I remain frustrated.

Feed me!

I've actually used RSS feeds before, using Google reader. I came up with a nice list of feeds that I liked, subscribed to them, and . . . quickly got so far behind at reading and listening that I gave up on it.

So far Bloglines seems a little simpler to use. I've added it as a home page so we'll see if I can keep up with it. I added some of the other 23things blogs that look interesting; it will definitely be easier to track new posts this way than to check them each individually.

I was somewhat surprised that two of the "top 50" on bloglines today were library-related. Could it be because there are lots of us looking for this type of blog for 23Things?

In the past, most of the things I've wanted to add as feeds were things I came across by accident. With a lot of them, I had the option of choosing a feed or a daily e-mail, and I guess I'm old-fashioned (or just old?) enough that I still prefer a lot of things to come directly to my inbox.

I'll try the feeds again; maybe it will work out better for me the second time around.

Top 3 reasons I'm participating in 23Things

1. Even though I have an MLS, I've been out of the workforce for seven years and a lot has passed me by. This is a chance to catch up with some of it.
2. I'm a trustee on a library board, and I feel that it's important in that role to be as knowledgeable about libraries as I can be, including what we might see in the future.
3. I love to learn, and at this point in my life it's a lot easier to learn from my living room than to attend workshops and classes.

Where to find the time?

For a long time, I've held the belief that we're all given the same amount of time in a day; what we choose to do with it is up to us. So I don't buy arguments of "I didn't have time to do that." More accurately, one should say, "I didn't take (or make) time to do that."

There's an old saying that if you want to get something done, ask a busy person to do it. There were days when I thought I was busy. Now, caring for four young children and helping my husband with the farm while serving on library boards, volunteer organizations, and church groups and keeping track of school schedules has made my life downright hectic. Are there other things I could be doing during this time? Of course! But I have chosen, for the benefit of the library system in which I am a trustee, to learn as much as I can. Perhaps it's easier for me than for other trustees since I have a library background, but I think anyone who is interested could find the time to do these 23 things, at least on a cursory basis.

I want to (and may still do it) send a link to the Stephen Abram's video to my fellow board members and the library staff in our system. In that segment, less that 7 minutes, there's a good start on what this is and why it's important. Another ten minutes spent reading the OCLC Web 2.0 articles provided even more information about what Web 2.0 is and why it's important to libraries. So, even if you don't fully want to participate in this program by writing the blog entries, you could "audit" Thing 2 in about 17 minutes and have just a start on thinking about the future in our libraries.

Those brief readings certainly have my wheels turning.

On Avatars, Privacy, and other Stuff

I'm rebelling against the suggestion to use the Yahoo avatars in Thing 1. I've used avatars in several other sites, and they've been a personal icon, something I've chosen on my own.

While the Yahoo avatars are nice little virtual paper dolls to dress, I'm going back to using a picture from my personal collection. It's a much better descriptor of me at this time.

I also wanted to write a little bit about the concept of blogs in general. I still find it odd that people will pour out their hearts and souls to the entire world. Maybe this is what some intend to do, but I suspect that a good many bloggers think "no one is going to read this except my close friends and family" and they blog away, never knowing the strangers who are reading about their world.

In my online activities, I've tried to be very careful to keep myself anonymous. I believe that associating myself with SMILE in this forum is as close as I've come to revealing my location. I don't post pictures of my kids' faces, nor do I post their names, and I'm pretty careful about what information I reveal about myself as well.

As far as other Stuff, I sincerely hope we have a snow (cold?) day tomorrow. C'mon, this is Minnesota and it's the end of January. Don't we deserve a day off by now?

Blog, blog, blog . . .

OK, I'll admit it. I like to play around with various programs just to see how they work. So for this, using Blogger to set up the blog gave me a good chance to play around with a new program.

I'm already pretty familiar with Wordpress; I've been using it with my Travels with Children blog for a while now. After an evening of exploring the Blogger menus, here's what I think.

Right away, I missed built-in statistics in Blogger. Wordpress puts these together automatically. On the other hand, I added Sitemeter easily enough to my Blogger writings, but apparently in Wordpress I'm using on of the templates where Sitemeter just doesn't work, for whatever reasons. Wish I would have known that before I spent a half hour adding the html.

Wordpress wins for adding web links to a page. I can get a basic url to show in Blogger, but to have the title show as a hotlink I had to pull out my old manual html skills.

Wordpress also has a lot more template style options available, although you can play with the colors in Blogger to tweak a template a little more. Each has some interesting things that you can add; I like the poll option in Blogger but it's easier to move objects around in Wordpress.

In Wordpress, I can add various pages on different topics within the blog. If that's available in Blogger, I haven't found it yet. I also haven't explored Blogger's category structure yet. Wordpress allows levels of categories with "parents" and is very flexible in its category listings.

Overall, I'm more pleased with Wordpress at this point. Blogger seems good for a beginner or a straightforward blogger who just writes each day. Wordpress seems to be more organize-able. Perhaps I'll change my mind as I play with Blogger more, however.

Back to the world of technology...

At one time, I was pretty tech-literate. I was in college just as e-mail came onto campus, and in library school in the early days of the Internet as we know it (remember Mosaic?). I went on to be a tech mentor in my school and was a network administrator. I could read Novell rights with the best of them.

And then life changed a little. My title changed from School Library Media Specialist to Stay-at-Home-Mom, and I'm happy to be here with my four little ones. I kept up with technology . . . or at least I thought I did.

Then I started hearing about wikis. And Flickr. And RSS. And some Delicious thing that had a lot of strange spaces in its spelling. I realized that technology was passing me by.

I did (barely) manage to keep my head above water. I've had a nice little blog for quite a while now. (Shameless plug for Travels with Children) I figured out RSS feeds, and just as soon figured out that I didn't really have time to read all the feeds I set up. I have online photo accounts, some public, some private, and I've tried to make an effort at "keeping up." Really, I have.

Perhaps my impetus for doing the 23Things project is a little different than that of others. I'm not doing this for my work. Or am I? I need to stay one step ahead of these little people I'm raising, because although this world of technology has so much to offer, from a mom's perspective, it's pretty scary to know the potentially harmful things that are out there. So I'm doing 23Things to keep up with technology so I can keep up with my kids.

And I hope to learn a few things for myself as well, at the ripe old age of 35. Perhaps you can teach an old-ish dog a few new tricks. Thanks for the opportunity!