Fire/EMS/Safety Library Blog

refresh, smrefresh!

2009-06-10T16:10:00.003-05:00

Long ago, when I signed up for More Things on A Stick, I spent a lot of time looking at new blog templates. For one reason or another, I didn't like them....either the colors or the logos or the typefaces/fonts or the number of columns or the combination of the above.

Ideally, I would really like to just design my own. For a personal blog, I have used a template in blogger that is a bit more blank and could at least get the photo I wanted into the heading at the top of the blog but couldn't control the typeface. For the personal blog, I post a lot of photos and have been REALLY frustrated with blogger regarding how the photos display. You can't really see how they will look in this composing window....not to mention that the window is too small...and the preview also doesn't really show how they will look either.

If I were accomplished in html...maybe placing photos or sizing them would work better. I suspect that the templates control a certain amount of what is going on with placement and sizing of photos??? It has been so frustrating to want to make something look a certain way and have it not appear that way when done. It has occurred to me to investigate the other blogging sites...

So, yes, I have looked at blog templates but I'm staying with what I have, thank you very much!

23 Things on a Stick Redux, thing 1

2008-05-30T13:59:00.002-05:00

23 Things on a Stick is going again, Round 2...May 15 to Sept 15. Registering again so that I can make the time to revisit some of the things that I didn't fully "get" the first time.

Since I began the project the first time around, I have set up 2 other blogs and several wikis. Not blogging my brains out but know they can be used in whatever way one chooses.

thing 23, done!

2008-04-09T15:45:00.003-05:00

Done!

I did this solo. I had hoped that a colleague would participate but colleague got bogged down and frustrated.

Some things should be broken down into separate things or smaller. There are too many possibilities, e.g. Thing 13.

As I wrote in the survey, I am now running 3 blogs, and a wiki. I am thinking of suggesting some of these tools for the fire librarians group I belong to.
I am still thinking about what else could be used for the library. I do think that giving our library patrons a place to talk back and ask for us to try to acquire things will be a starting place!

In one sentence or less: While 23 Things on A Stick is a great learning tool, and better than sliced bread, it takes longer to accomplish than baking!

Yes, I would participate in learning more things...just give more time to complete. Deadline, however is good.

Thanks for all your hard work in putting this together.

I am going to repurpose the blog so it can be for the library itself and not a record of my own work.

thing 22 keeping current

2008-04-09T15:36:00.003-05:00

I am going to look some more at the suggestions you give on this page

I am maintaining 3 blogs as a result of this project and have set up one wiki and taught 5 other people (4 in their 50s, and one in their late 20s) how to use the wiki.

Yes, there is more that I can be doing...but it's not all that shabby!

It's just hard to remember to keep looking at different things like RSS feeds, etc. etc.

I think that I need more understanding of RSS feeds and need to revisit that.

thing 20

2008-04-09T15:26:00.003-05:00

I did made a Facebook page for the library. For those of you who are Facebook members, you can see it at: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Saint-Paul-MN/FireEMSSafety-Center-Library/30506985135

right now it is bare bones.

I joined the Libraries Using Facebook Pages group.

I posted to my own wall.

I watched 5 videos on different parts of facebook but was stil confused about setting up the page for the library. It is different to set up a page than join as a person.

I didn't want to put my real name in as you still have to join up with an actual name...so I finally got to one that Facebook would accept. I am not sure that the profile is edited correctly.

The library spaces on MySpace were for public library teens. Lots of advertisements, which I don't like - distracting.

The reason I made a library page in Facebook is to make our library more visible as we are hard to find.

Thing 21 Other Social Networks

2008-04-09T14:00:00.006-05:00

Yelp, reviews looks interesting. It might be worth joining just because so many people have trouble finding us or knowing about us.

I joined the 23 Things on a Stick Ning and added a comment to the discussion When/Where are you finding time to work on the 23 things.
I've also added the small 23 Things Ning badge to the sidebar of the blog. I will have to remember that the widgets for the slideshow, music player, and video player are on the same page as the badges.

Steve Campion's Aug 30, 2007 article in WebJunction (I am a member of Web Junction and even think I know where my password is!) makes the most relevant point I've read about social networking:
"Learning about social networking through a site that interests a specific individual helps him/her understand why millions of people ...invest time in the social web."

This is only too true.

I am a member of a social networking site based on a hobby/arts interest. It was one I had to get on a waiting list to join and then receive an admission from the site administrators. It is a great place for learning and finding out about new things going on in this area of interest. It is totally engrossing. It's well designed and doesn't have flashing flashy intrusive advertisements. As a matter of fact, someone recently posted a discussion thread there about why the site is better than MySpace. Many responses were from people who fit right into the target MySpace demographic and they said things like they liked the lack of offensive advertising and lack of drunken photo/content and that the people there were all there for the same reason, a shared interest.

The Houghton Mifflin Peterson Guide information mentioned in the Can Gather.com Get Book Lovers Online article (thanks Nan Hoekstra for posting the link to the article in the comments to this thing) had to be searched for. It appears that exceprts from these nature guides may have stopped in December...too bad. Gather.com seemed a bit hard to find content/navigate, but then perhaps this is just idiosyncratic of all social networking sites that are unexplored.

I am thinking that the Ning, Wiki and/or blog might be useful to set up for a Fire Librarian's group I belong to!

almost to thing 23 and some comments

2008-04-07T16:07:00.001-05:00

I only have 3 more things until Thing 23 ..... I am motivated to finish this!!!

It is very useful but very time consuming!!!!

thing 19 podcasts

2008-04-07T15:51:00.003-05:00

Here is a link to a page of podcasts (Book Lust with Nancy Pearl) from Podcast.com

Here is a link to Cast-on website where you can download the podcasts. I have listened to this (downloaded by a friend) while traveling. Found through Podcastalley.com

Podcast.net wasn't working when I tried it.

The Gcast website for creating your own podcasts by calling them into a phone looks really intriguing. When I have time, I hope to try it. I will return to this thing and look at more of the podcasting links when I have TIME!!!

thing 18 redux

2008-04-07T15:23:00.004-05:00

See my post on January 28, in which I posted two Youtube videos; I didn't realize then (because I hadn't looked at all of Thing 18) that one of the ones I posted was in thing 18 - the medieval book. I had never seen the Conan the Librarian video, what a hoot, nor the Library musical, nor the takeoff on the mac/pc librarian/IT - very good!!!!

I thought that the video of the tour of Winona State Library was very good but wondered about whether it was OK to use someone else's music???

I saw someone in the March of the Librarians who looked like Leona Carlson waving to the camera. I don't know if it was really her or not?

Thing 17

2008-04-07T14:35:00.022-05:00

Elm Productivity
Here is a page I made in EBSCOhost. The background of the page isn't showing but the searches and search result are. I saved the page to my hard drive and then looked at the source html and copied it into this post. I had to make most of the text bigger so that it would show up in the post on the blog and I couldn't see it in the preview mode (even when text made larger to "normal" size) on the blog but could see it in the compose mode.

Edited: the link to the search doesn't work right. It searches fire not fire fighters!!! And there are tons of results. The fire fighter search with the limits I put on it had 52 results!

Also, the link to the help for RSS feeds doesn't show any text.

Searches to pay attention to

Link to a search done 4/1/08, fire fighters keyword, limit full text, March through April 2008

to search EBSCO Megafile

How to set up RSS feeds alerts etc

These articles were from a search on fire fighting, January to April 2008, Megafile, full text. Many articles in search were full text newspapers. Watch out for this in MegaFile

Apparatus Specifications: Avoiding the Pitfalls. (cover story) By: Adams, Bill. Fire Engineering, Feb2008, Vol. 161 Issue 2, p79-84, 6p; (AN 30104089)

Fire fighting small part of what department does By: Shaner, Cassie. Dominion Post, The (Morgantown, WV), 01/06/2008; (AN 2W62W61327255413)

Situation Awareness. By: Brunacini, Alan. Fire Engineering, Feb2008, Vol. 161 Issue 2, p140-140, 1p; (AN 30104102)

Support Beams. By: Cavette, Chris. Fire Chief, Jan2008, Vol. 52 Issue 1, p76-80, 4p; (AN 30012086)

THE FIRE BIRDS. By: Hoffman, Carl. Popular Mechanics, Feb2008, Vol. 185 Issue 2, p70-77, 8p, 5c; (AN 30030074)

I use the ELM databases a lot. I could spend more time refamiliarizing myself with all the productivity tools in ProQuest and others. I teach people how to use Elm Databases on our library website, and how to use our NetLibrary collection on a regular basis, including making notes and setting up an account. Our NetLibrary collection is cataloged and into our online catalog. We have a search option for excluding Netlibrary (all EXCEPT ebooks) and I also teach users how to search only ebooks (keyword + the word netlibrary). I hope to eventually make some tutorials specifically for our users using Captivate, which we just got.

We are now also telling folks that you can go to http://www.elm4you.org/ and if they are coming in from a computer with a Minnesota IP, they can get into the databases without a library card or password. This is very useful for some!!!

We have participated in many Minitex webinars and workshops and they all have been very useful. Yay Minitex!!!!

Thing 15 Online Games and Libraries

2008-04-07T13:16:00.003-05:00

It was hard for me to believe that I should be playing a game at work and that it was work. I created a pirate and bilged and carpented in Puzzle Pirates. I wasn't sure what I was doing intially in bilging but the people on the ship I ended up on were nice to me. I got to neophyte status on both tasks (carpentering was more intutive for me) and earned some pieces of eight, that I had no idea what to do with. The games would end and the captain(?) would tell me to go offshore to an island. Someone asked me to be their hearty and I agreed but I guess I would have to hearty them back to see them on my list of people???

The value of this for me was realizing that learning about it was experiential - NOT by reading about how to play the games (which I did some of but didn't really understand until I actually started to do them). Also, whenever someone wrote something nice to me, it was pleasant, as was any positive feedback from the games themselves.

I wonder where the game is on my computer; it took a long time to download it and we have a fast connection here at work.

I looked at the Second Life video. It didn't have much narration, and therefore was just primarily visual and not informative enough for me. The Ohio University video was better, but being a promotion, not meaty enough, again so much more visual than informational. The link to the explanation about Alliance Library System's Info Island was the most informative.

I, however, am truly puzzled about the virtual world of Second Life. I would like to check out Info Island, but don't have enough time to invest in joining Second Life to see it. The fact that the Allliance Library worked with database vendors to have instances of the databases within the virtual world sounds intriguing.

I am not sure, though, other than in a public library, how this helps. Certain teens assuredly spend a lot of time in virtual universes. I'm reluctant to do so myself as I already feel married to the computer! It seems like it would be addicting and I'm already addicted enough to the screen.

Experience tells me though, that to really understand, I would need to experience.

But, shouldn't we also be reinforcing things like face to face interactions and getting up off ones behinds and moving in the real world so that we don't have present and future generations becoming big hunks of lard?

More on Thing 13

2008-04-07T10:40:00.004-05:00

Calendars:
There is a link to the Web's Best Calendars in Wired magazine (2/20/07). The link to Kiko doesn't work. It appears that Kiko was bought by TuCows (based on further searching), perhaps for that company's internal use?

Scrybe looks quite interesting with its calendar drag and drop features and types of integration and context and multiple time zone tracking and use as a personal organizer. However, it is no longer accepting beta users.

Backpack looks interesting too, though in a way it seems to be a personal type of wiki to me.

The PDF converter looks very cool.

The file type converter from Zamzar also looks useful, but it only has 128 bit SSL (secure converstion) with the non-free account options. Something to keep in mind in a pinch, however! Don't like all the ads on Zamzar though.

Regarding personal pages. Yes, I think I do want to have one...PageFlakes looks especially interesting since it doesn't have the amount of ads of Yahoo and I don't think that Yahoo keeps your info all that secure??? Will look at them some more before deciding!

BTW: the countdown widget on the 23 Things blog is not visible to me either.

Other apps: Mozy back up is something I am going to look into.
The 2007 guide to free software and webapps is also something to keep in mind.

overload! overload! thing 13

2008-04-04T15:58:00.005-05:00

My brain is on overload! I am looking at all these tools in thing 13; online productivity tools and feel that I will never be productive if I get involved in figuring out the value or not of these tools!!!

So far, what I have found useful is the Top Ten Sites to Boost Your Online Productivity article, which had a link to the tiny url maker, which I just used to make the link. I always wondered how to do that!

And I bookmarked some sites using Deli (I can't get the dots right in the spelling consistently either) which is a first and I can see its use.

I can also see that having one page to go to all these places would be very very useful. It is too overloading right now to figure out which one and their advantages.

I admit, I haven't looked at all the tools in this thing yet. This thing is too big!!!

thing 12; digg, mixx, etc.

2008-04-04T15:24:00.003-05:00

I looked at this book review in the NYT and found I could "share" it as a permalink by embedding it into the blog. The NYT says that access to the article will be ensured, even after it becomes part of the NYT archive.

I looked at Digg, Newsvine, Reddit, Mixx, StumbleUpon and my eyes began to glaze over. Some of them (I forget which at the moment) have advertising...not what I want to connect to from a work site and one of them even said something about receiving ad revenue back if you write something in a column in your account, which is not ethical in a public entity like our library.

Each new thing (and iteration of the details of the thing) requires learning some other site or utility's organization. It is too much.

In reality, I am seeing these kinds of newsfeeds and popularization/prioritization every time I log in and out of a personal Yahoo email account. This is good enough for me.

The ability to add a permalink into a website or blog, as the NYT offered is more useful and more productive than getting yet another account.

Thing 11: tagging and del.icio.us

2008-04-04T14:46:00.003-05:00

Tags work a little differently in different environments (see what I wrote about LibraryThing)!

I have looked at the del.icio.us material and set up the widget and tag function on my IE browser and started the import of one of my browser "favorites" folders. I am still waiting for the import to finish as I am writing this.

The idea of being able to get to my bookmarks from whereever is a great one. Anything that helps organize bookmarks will be great. Mine need a greater degree of organization. I don't know if del.icio.us will help enough or not until I can see how the imported ones appear and what else I should do with them.

I think it is also something that could be useful for some of our library users.

I also looked at Furl and Pagekeeper, which appear to have a better visual interface.

Thing 16, Assignment Calculator and Research Project Calculator

2008-04-03T15:46:00.004-05:00

I am familiar with the Assignment Calculator and have code to add it to areas that I control, though I haven't yet.

The research project calculator is interesting. I find in it so far a lot of content similar to what I used myself in a long one shot (four hour) course I taught on repeated occasions at another college on information literacy and basic research skills, how to organize research, steps in research, etc., evaluating sources.

Thing 9, Online Collaboration Tools, OR: the case of the refreshing screen

2008-04-03T14:46:00.003-05:00

I requested permission to edit the Declaration in Google Documents. The request must have triggered some message to the 23 Things people or account, because I also received in my gmail account, a link to the Zoho version...which I don't recall requesting!!!

I totally agree with the comments in the 23 Things blog,
which I read before starting this thing

a. the Google documents editor drove me nuts! The screen refreshes so quickly that you can't make your edit and save it in a timely way. It appears that the screen is on its own timer for refreshing and it is not keyed to whether you are keying something in or not. Finally, I just rushed in and clicked on something and managed to get the word truth in the first line edited and saved into a larger size.

I could not edit the copy of the Zoho document that was sent to me. After reading the Books Rock! comment on the 23 Things blog, I decided that it wasn't worth it to set up an account...Books Rock! said that the document goes away after login and she/he could not find, retrieve or upload the practice document.

Given the quirks of these document editors, though they are a good idea, they appear REALLY flawed and why would we want to share document editing this way? There must be better tools....or am I missing something here?

What would the founding fathers think?
I imagine that the concept of collaborative editing would appeal to them very much, though perhaps only Franklin and Jefferson would become beguiled by our 20th/21st c. technology!

Thing 10, Wikis

2008-04-03T14:15:00.006-05:00

Below is the entry that I added to the 23 Things wiki

"The idea of setting up a wiki so that our library users could list items that they would like us to get (not that we have the funds for acquisition...another story) is something we are going to give some thought to. No idea that this was so straightforward. I can see other uses for wikis outside of the library too, in other collaborative areas of life!!!

(4/3/08, Fire/EMS/Safety Library)"

The You Tube video from Common Craft on wikis was excellent!

The other links were a bit superfluous, other than the one, Wikis, A Beginners Look slide show. In general so many links in a thing are so time consuming and I feel that I just get in deeper and deeper. Each thing takes quite a long time and I end up with many windows open on the computer. Today, probably because earlier work at the library involved downloading some large documents, the computer froze and I had to empty the download cache to continue working on 23 things!!!

I created a private wiki for a group with whom I am collaborating, using PB wiki. I am learning as I go along. I am a bit confused about the notification or not. Will the people I have invited get a notification via email every time the wiki is edited (unless I turn the notification off)?? The idea was to avoid lots of email among the group.

Prior to viewing the Common Craft video, I knew that wikis existed but didn't have a good idea why they would be useful.

I can see how this is a cool collaborative tool!

On Wikipedia: hmmm....I know it is useful for some really obscure information. As an academic librarian, however, I do feel that researchers and students should verify information found there in other sources, including print-based (e.g. reference and article databases) ones.
If I were making an assignment, I would instruct students that Wikipedia could be a last resort, not a first one.

There are many instructors who do limit their students to information by format. This is increasingly interesting to cope with in the library since many journals are no longer held in print format and the student cannot get the most relevant information in print.

However, I do think that it is important for every student to have the experience, at least once, of finding an article (from a citation) in an actual print journal so that they know about this process as a tool.

thing 8: Mosaic (Big Huge Lab) and efolio

2008-03-20T16:25:00.011-05:00

I have a link on the side bar to the photos I found but it didn't make an image. I am not quite sure why.

I will write more about this later.

Later (edited 4/3/08).....I went to Big Huge Lab --the mosaic link and then brought up the html from the previously constructed sidebar element which had the flickr url locations of the photos I wanted to use. I set up a 3 x 3 grid and then pasted the urls into the 9 locations. This, still, just gave me a list of links to each individual photo in the side bar.

I looked some more and there was a prompt to save the mosaic (as a jpeg). After some experimentation, I realized I had to save this to my computer. When I did this, I deleted the old sidebar element and added a new one which was a picture rather than an html and voila, got the mosaic!!!

Efolio:
I use efolio to author the library only website, http://library.project.mnscu.edu

Thank goodness for efolio! Site hosting and updating is problematic in our organization and I can always get into efolio and make updates and edits to the library website and don't have to depend on anyone else or any other software!!! It has been a totally wonderful thing to have access to this for the library website.

I also previously looked at the other tools such as the slideshows but each of them had some drawbacks. In some of the teaching I do, anything that I can use that would not require students to have to have particular software to see the images is a good tool.

Non linear accomplishment of things: Thing 14 (LibraryThing)

2008-03-20T14:42:00.003-05:00

LibraryThing is not new to me. Over a year ago, I set up an account...but I'll be darned if I can remember what the username or password were! Luckily, my recollection is that I didn't put a lot of books into it!

Over the past weekend, I spent a great deal of time on LibraryThing for a personal blog I have started as a result of 23 Things.

I learned then that, contrary to another online universe that I have been spending time with, LibraryThing considers 2-word phrases as whole tags (that other place considers each word separated by a space as a separate tag). LibraryThing notices the end of a tag (when there are several) by the insertion of a comma when you are tagging. I learned this the hard way since I put a random books (book covers) widget into my personal blog and had to edit most of the tags on the close to 40 books I had put in to get the subset of the ones I wanted to show up.

How would we use LibraryThing here in the library? Well, we could put the covers up of our newest books. Right now we have a New Books list that we publish on the website quarterly after we receive it from OCLC. It would be additional work to add these items to LibraryThing and a certain number of them won't have covers already in LibraryThing. For the 5 books I put in, two of them have covers that are images I grabbed from the publisher's website.

At this point, I didn't put the link in the random covers to link to "my LibraryThing" since there are only 5 books in it.

I am just not sure whether this is something that would be good for us or not? Maybe rather than linking such a display to our blog, it would make sense to insert it into our web site. I don't know how many patrons will look at the blog as opposed to the website?

I must admit, however, that I really do like the covers feature of LibraryThing as it appeals to visual people.

Thing 7: Web Communication Tools

2008-03-13T15:42:00.004-05:00

Newish, newerish, newest - or maybe old, medium, and right now? That's how I think about some of these communication tools.

Today I attended a very good presentation by John O'Brien, VP of Academic Affairs at Century College who reiterated that today's 19 year old college students don't email so much as they IM or text message. I have seen this in people related to me.

Here's the dilemma we keep confronting over and over when thinking about these tools in regard to our own library. ....the percent of typical 19 year old college students who use us is only one segment. We have very technology savvy students and many non traditional students (some of whom have no computer skills) who cover a wide age range. What percent of our core users are using these tools????

Our use of email: we are so dependent upon it that we have almost stopped talking with each other, a hazard.

Our use of IM: it has been used as an intergroup communication tool, rather than one that we have opened to the public. It is the only way we often can get a response from one of our group members who is outstate, and this is not a millenial! If we ever set up an IM type "Ask Us" Meebo would be good since it could enable anyone from different IM products to interact with us.

Text messaging: who would pay for this? We don't have cell phones in the library. I don't do text messaging on a personal level either due to the cost. Yes, yes, we know that the newest research says that the thing that people of a certain age could not live without would be their cell phones, above their computers. The video demonstration of a student texting a librarian (is this in a library) puzzles. Is there some reason a face to face question is bad?

Webinars: wonderful! We "attend" them all the time for training. Time saver and money saver. Almost as good as sliced bread.

Twitter. I watched the videos. I understand that if you are at a giant conference with many venues like ALA it could be good if a bunch of people all have texting or iPhones or Blackberries and could use it to set up meeting after sessions for dinner. Otherwise, I don't get it nor its extensions. I am trying to figure out why anyone would use it.

Again, feeling overwhelmed by all the technology possibilities in Web 2.0. It is up to us all to pick and choose wisely given that there is only so much that can be monitored at once and also for us to produce quality accurate work.

a provoking article about web 2.0 (thing 2)

2008-02-21T14:55:00.006-06:00

Minitex just sent out a link to this article by a librarian from Gustavus.
http://insidehighered.com/views/2008/02/18/fister
It and the comments (at least as of 2:56 p.m. on 2/21/08) are worth reading.

It brings points that I too have been wondering about
--free information, free access, but what is the real price....who is cacheing the data about what we click on and what are they going to do with it
--protecting one's identity online. I think we need more guidelines and 23 Things could be a place to do this.
--all the issues with intellectual property and journal access etc.
--librarians and libraries as the purveyors and protectors of our information access rights.

Thing 5

2008-02-21T13:19:00.010-06:00

Here is

Here is

Here is

Here is the URL http://metaatem.net/words/

These mashups are interesting and something that I never knew about before either.
Indeed, some of them are endless sops of time. I just HAD to try the visual Suduko which is hard if the color value of some of the images is similar.

I am not sure how these would be useful to our library, though I could see doing a collage of photos. However, I couldn't try this out yet with this post since I don't have enough photos loaded yet and the place to do this wanted yet ANOTHER registration and I fear the ability to keep track of so many passwords, as I have mentioned before.

Gaak! In the preview of this post, the words fit across without breaking up. It must be the constraints of the design template I am using but I don't understand which things in the html of that template I need to change to make the body of it wider. Help...does anyone know how to do this???

Book Stacks....thing 4

2008-02-08T10:56:00.001-06:00

Book Stacks
Originally uploaded by firemnlibrary

Here it is....however, it is not coming over from uploading in blogger with the pop up note?

I just looked at St.Bens/St.Johns...it appears that their photos with popup notes aren't in their library blog or library website either....just on their Flickr account????

It would be really cool to be able to import such thing into a library blog and/or library web site? IS it possible???

more Thing 4: What a GREAT IDEA.. or maybe not...see the post that is above this one

2008-02-08T10:16:00.000-06:00

After looking at what St. Johns and St. Bens libraries are doing with photos with links to their catalogs, I am full of ideas on using this to connect with our library users!

(Edited..see post above this one...there may be no way to get the photo with the pop up link into one's blog and/or website...maybe it only pops up in Flickr?? If so, not what I want to do)

So, had to figure out how to add a note that will pop up upon mousing over the photo. This is easy...just click on the Add A Note icon above your photo.

Then, how to make it link...well that is html. Couldn't remember the syntax:

Just to get the line to show the actual code above was a challenge! Since Blogger is an html editor itself, if you put in the code, it just changes to a highlighted link. I had to copy the code from another source and put it into a picture editor (used Fireworks)and save it as a .png image and then edit it to a better size in some MS picture editor and then upload it as no format and move the code in the blog entry to where I wanted it!

Now I want to show you the photo!

Cluster Map

2008-02-07T16:13:00.001-06:00

I also added a cluster map (see who is looking at the blog from world locations) on the right. I saw that there was one in the 23 Things Blog and said, well, how hard can that be? Not hard. You just have to register somewhere else and have another password. HA!

I have put it on my personal blog too but I am not sure if I can do that? Maybe I need to register that blog too? I just put in the code into the personal blog. Maybe that means that stats from both blogs will be aggregated? Maybe I need to register that blog address separately rather than just sticking the code in.

Does anyone know?

Edited: I decided that I had to register the other blog too, so I did.

Flickr ..part of thing 4

2008-02-07T15:49:00.001-06:00

entrydesks
Originally uploaded by firemnlibrary

Here is a photo of the librarians desks at the Fire/EMS/Safety Library. I created a NEW yahoo account and a thus a NEW Flickr account for work because Flickr has a limit to how many photos can be available total for loading (as I recall it is 200 total?) before you have to pay them to keep the photos available.

I just set up a Flickr account for the personal blog about 10 days ago and don't want to use up the photo limit for this work blog.

So, WOE is me....another email account and password.....NO!

I admit, I haven't read all the Flickr info in Thing 4 yet, but knew I had these photos available at work and wanted to get them up for folks to see our library!

I created this blog entry in Flickr, not in Blogger.

I am now editing this post in Blogger. You do your edits in Blogger, not flickr!!!

rss feeding frenzy??? (thing 3)

2008-01-31T12:27:00.000-06:00

I am not being very successful here. I signed up for Google reader. I have signed up for some RSS feeds.

Very confused on how Google reader displays things and it seems like going to an RSS reader is just another thing one needs to look at. (I admit, I have had RSS reluctance for a while.) I set up some folders in Google reader and now am wondering if I can move them around. Tired of having 8 windows open on my computer (with help windows and target urls and Blogger and Google reader etc) when I do this.

One BIG discovery: Known Issues for Blogger: http://knownissues.blogspot.com/2006/09/microsoft-internet-explorer-6.html

"Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 attempts to download links to site feeds, rather than display them in the browser. You can right click the link to copy the location into your feed reader."

THIS accounts for the fact that when I clicked on subscribe to another blog's posts, that the computer gave me a message saying that it was trying to open or save a file of a type it wasn't sure of. GUESS WHAT though.... in at least one other instance, it happened on Firefox too.

Also, I went to a blog and the only subscribe link was to do it in Bloglines. Well, thought I, this can't be right...one must be able to subscribe no matter what reader one uses. So, I searched for that blog using the search button in Google reader (the image to subscribe on said blog, when right-clicked upon was a .gif image) and was able to do it that way.

So, what I want to do...when I come back to this another day in a more refreshed frame of mind

look at the help some more. I saw something about adding something so that your RSS feed would be a regular RSS 2.0 feed rather than an "atom" feed, whatever that is
try to figure out where to get a nice RSS button for anyone who wants to subscribe to this blog and just make sure it is easier for someone else to subscribe than it was for me to subscribe to other Blogger blogs.
try to figure out more about Google reader and moving around in it. If I can't stand it, I guess I will switch to Bloglines.

While I am ranting, I also am getting overwhelmed by the number of things needing sign-ins and passwords to work in Web 2.0. If my brain stops working, I will never ever be able to log in to my email accounts, open any computer, check voicemail, teach online, you name it. It might be time for me to try to do a count of all my ids, passwords, etc. I do know that I am at TILT and am raving.

a thing about 23 Things

2008-01-28T15:55:00.002-06:00

23 Things has already helped me. I had no idea it was so easy to set up a blog. Last weekend I went home and set up a blog related to a hobby of mine so that I could share some photos and comments with far flung friends and family without them having to go specifically to a photo sharing site.

Some things about Thing 2 and Thing 18

2008-01-28T15:38:00.001-06:00

Thing 2:
Stephen Abram is so right, especially about learning these 2.0 tools...it has to be experience-based learning. You don't know until you do it!

He also spoke about unintended consequences and I think that this is very important in all learning...what ever mode or medium. Serendipity can be quite useful to learning and creativity. He also emphasized the importance of relecting on what you are learning.

"The Ongoing Web Revolution" article from Library Technology Reports (Sept-Oct 2007) was useful for the YouTube video "Web 2.0.. The Machine Is Us/ing Us" (which I think is linked in Thing 18) but you should see it now! I thought it was especially useful for making the distinction between html (format only) and xml. (form and content) though there is much more to learn about this.

Als, here is one of the favorite library related YouTube videos I've ever been clued in to, Introducing the Book (also known as Medieval Helpdesk)....relevant to adjusting to new technologies.

"

Thing 6 Soup on sidebar

2008-01-25T15:55:00.001-06:00

Apparently have need to do things out of sequence.

Used ImageChef. No idea these image generators existed. This is why 23 Things is good. Fun. Fast. Easy.

Have now deleted avatar!

I discovered that the background of this blog's template is composed of several .gif images. I found what I want to edit. However, I do not know if a .gif can be edited for color and if so, what software might work to do so?? Any ideas out there?

Thing 1 of 23 Things

2008-01-23T13:59:00.000-06:00

About Thing 1

Frustrated that it appears one must know more about how to read html code in order to change the background color of the blog's template. Easy color changes are only for text, it appears. I saw that I could download the template in html. If anyone can help me with how to change the header template background color, I would appreciate it.
Viewing the Minitex tutorial before getting started on setting up the blog was VERY helpful and am glad that I did so before starting.
While setting up a Yahoo avatar was mildly amusing, the images available are poorly rendered. Wii game avatars are more fun. The avatar comes down as soon as possible.
It appears one cannot move the avatar to any place other than within the hierarchy on the right hand side of my template....could not move it to the bottom, for instance...so it is a misnomer to say that you can move page elements around anywhere.
Google help cleared up the fact that the email account in the header, visible to me, is, in fact, not visible to users of the blog...which is how I wanted it.
It is totally freaking me out that whatever I write is visible to the whole world!

Welcome to the Fire/EMS/Safety Library blog!

2008-01-23T13:31:00.001-06:00

Hi
This is an experiment in learning Web 2.0 tools and is part of the 23 Things On A Stick learning program sponsored by Minnesota libraries. As such, it is a place where we will be posting reactions to learning the tools. If you are a library user, you can ignore my rants on learning how to use these tools......

It is also a place where you can communicate with us at the library.

Gwen