Week 5: RSS & Feed Readers

This week was much more calming for me. I am currently working on another Technology training program at my local library 2010 HPL(Hutchinson Public Library). We just had a session on RSS feeds and Readers. So this just allowed me to expand on that knowledge and have a refresher course.

I selected Bloglines to go more with the 23thingskansas project. I had set it up already when I worked on my 2010 HPL project, but I also set up one via Google reader. Our library is expanding its use of Google products to be able to communicate internally more easily. I like the function of the Google reader a little more than that of Bloglines, because you can just place websites and it will send an auto RSS feed if anychanges are made to the site. Bloglines, only allows feeds that have been set up by the website you are wanting to subscribe to.

On my Bloglines account I subscribed to Resource Shelf, Library Stuff, & Dilbert Daily strip. I already had some Feeds set up prior to this for Weather in my area from Weather.com, Reuters, The Shifted Librarian, Cute Overload, Comingsoon.net, & Hutchnews.com. These are quite interesting and are very easy to scan through. I think that RSS feeds are something that I will use more often, now that I can understand them more fully.

On my Google Reader account I subscribed to Hutchpl.org (which currently doesn't have RSS Feeds yet), Hutchnews.com, & Kwch.com.
I can't wait to expand these both to more sites and will be scanning for the RSS symbol when surfing the web.

Week 4: Photo Sharing

Bru Crue Coffee Bar
Originally uploaded by ajshutchpl

I decided to do the option B in this weeks activities. I wanted to be able to include whatever I may learn into something that could benefit the library, too. Getting the time to take the photos I wanted/needed to create a virtual tour was not as easy as I had anticipated. We don't have our lights on until 15 minutes before opening to conserve on energy, this allowed only 15 Minute intervals to catch glimpes of the areas without staff or patrons in the areas.

Eventually, I finally got most of the pictures that I had wanted to share.

I was then able to create the account for Flickr.com and upload my pictures. I like the group tagging that you are able to do, so that all my pictures could be tagged 23thingsks. I then tagged each individual photo and gave a brief description. I had some trouble getting into and back out of this Organizing/tagging area of FLICKR. However, I managed to get through them. I have also been playing around with the Animoto site in creating a video of the photos, as well as another site I found called STUPEFLIX.

I think that FLICKR has some issues in making things easier to work with and to upload. I also wish they had more storage for free. Most pictures now days have larger sizes and you can't get very many in the 100 MB that you get for free, as compared to PICASA by Google.



Here is my test video using ANIMOTO.

I selected one of their templates and uploaded photos and that is all. This has a lot of photos and since they allow only 30 secounds for the free videos. It progresses too quickly. But it gave me experience for the next one that I try.