Thing # 8 Just a Little Bit Late: RSS Feeds

Bloglines, where have you been all my life? I can't believe how easy you make it to keep up with eighty different sites without a lot of clicking and checking and waiting to load! You're easy to set up, you recognize me when I return without making me sign in, you don't have any ads.

I love you unconditionally! Your name could be more euphonious, but one can't have everything. (Where would you put it?)
I can make folders, you say? So my list of eighty-plus sites can be orderly.

And that's just a fraction of what Bloglines can do, it seems. There's a nifty search function that lets you search for words and phrases anywhere, or only in your own feeds, and it's sortable by date, so you can track the latest mention of, say, "Queens Library" in a host of library blogs.

And not to forget Thing Number 9: Some library-related blogs I find very informative, useful and enlightening include the incomparable Jessamyn West, and the Librarian in Black.

Freestyle Counting

I think I missed Thing #6, exploring Flickr mashups and the like. So let's see if I can do this spell-with-flickr thing:



There! Well that was a
!! In fact, it was so much fun I'm not sure I can


But I will for now.The nice thing about this application is the ease with which you can change the individual letters. Don't like this "p"? Click it and get another. That one is unbalanced with the sizes of the other letters? Click again and presto. I'm thrilled I don't get a field of letters to choose from, as that would suck time like a Dyson.

Photo Montager is another Flickr mashup I tried. Now there, I wish I'd had some choice of which photo would be montaged, but no, you pick a tag and some photo with that tag is chosen for you and "montaged", or roughly imitated, using many many flickr photos. Meh, I thought, but then I was charmed when I realized that, as your cursor passes over the montage, individual pictures pop out. That was a sweet little effect. I want to play with that some more using really unusual tags...