Go forth and be creative. (Thing 8)

When I first looked at the possibilities in this Thing, several of them seemed to be pretty showy. It reminded me of being in college, with my tiny little 2/40 Mac Classic and its dot-matrix printer that was so COOL because of all the fonts it had available. So, naturally, I felt I had to use as many of those fonts as possible, until I learned a thing or two about presentation design. Taking all of the fun things and actually making them useful and effective can be a trick.

I'm on some Internet bulletin boards and I've seen a lot of slideshows in people's "signatures," and now I know how easy they are to create. I might have to change my boring little text-only siggy to something more exciting. Creating a slideshow on Picture Trail was amazingly easy. My pictures uploaded very quickly, I chose the pictures from my album and a presentation style I wanted, and voila! I had the code in hand. Let's see if it works: (I don't quite trust the auto-code yet.)

The online presentations could be useful in many ways. I was recently part of a church committee where we had to share information and not everyone could open attachments in e-mail, so I ended up copying and pasting text into messages, which was less than ideal. Putting it in an online presentation would have been a good alternative. On the other hand, I wouldn't rely solely on it for a face-to-face presentation because I never trust that there's a good Internet connection where I'm going. If there's a way to create it online and then save a copy to my computer, that would be very useful. Perhaps that functionality is there and I missed it.

Similar to the database tool (and maybe it will be coming up in a future Thing) is the "My Maps" feature of Google maps. I'm in the process of creating maps of children's museum and science museum locations. I can overlay them, and when we're looking for a vacation spot, I can see where they are at a glance to get more bang for our membership buck. Here are the children's museums where we have membership reciprocity. Here's a link in case the preview doesn't load: http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=102450997014433187097.0004455cd6b4e73c6d166&ll=38.410558,-96.503906&spn=28.26142,82.265625&z=4&om=0

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Something like this will be useful on my Travels with Children blog. (Yes, another shameless plug. You really ought to take a peek, dear reader.) ;-) I can see how a database could also be useful. Once I've done the legwork to compile information, I'd enjoy being able to share it with others.

In the library, it might be possible to have a database where users could enter their book requests, or program ideas, possibly even online sign-up for special events. Having something available in a web-based format rather than requiring each user to have the same program in order to share seems to be very useful.