Thing 25 - Bloggers Toolkit

I looked at the videos about widgets and there was a lot of good information included. I looked through Widgetbox and Google to search for some widgets to put on my blog. I found that both were easy to navigate, but I liked Widgetbox a little better - it had better categories and it gave you live previews of how the widget would actually work in your blog!

I've used some widgets before. I had LibraryThing on my blog during the first round, and then added RSS at the beginning of this round. I also used Clustrmap on a wiki that our library set up for Teen Read Week. I added 2 new widgets for this Thing, a digital clock on the bottom of the page and a movie trailer widget. I took the movie trailer one off already as it took you off the page. Isn't the whole point of widgets to get people to stay on your blog?

The best widget I've seen looking at other peoples blogs was a Super Mario widget on Shane's blog. Although I lost right away, it was fun!

Thing 22 - What Did I Learn Today?

Taking part in 23 Things has at times been frustrating, but overall has been a good experience. I've enjoyed seeing all the options that are out in the technology world, whether I think I'll use them or not. There are a few things that when I was first introduced to them I didn't think I would ever look at the site again. Of course, those are the ones that I've now become addicted to. My favorite Things were: Bloglines, LibraryThing, Facebook, discovering other social networks, and YouTube.

I'm not sure if I'll keep up with my blog. I don't have much going on in my life outside of work, so I think I would run out of stuff to talk about. Maybe I'll try it for a few weeks and see how it goes. I will be using many of the things I've learned, both at work and at home. I will also continue to play with the different technologies that I've started accounts with. There was so much information during 23 Things, that I don't think it had time to sink in. Now I can go back and actually take my time working through things.

Thing 14 - LibraryThing

I love LibraryThing. I've been using it for about seven months and have really enjoyed it. I needed a way to keep all the books that I own straight. That way if I ever move or rearrange, I'll know where they all were and hopefully it will make it a little easier to put back in order. Or if we get an earthquake. That probably won't happen in this part of the country, but it's good to be safe. It was really easy to add my books into the computer. The first time, it did take a little dedication to get all the way through, but now I just add the book as soon as I bring it home from the store and it's taken care of. What I've recently started doing was adding reviews to a few of my books. It's been hard for me to really say anything valuable in the reviews other than yay or boo, but I spose that will come with practice.

There are still so many things on the site that I haven't gotten involved with yet. I joined the group Librarians who LibraryThing, but haven't really contributed anything. It makes me feel guilty for being in the group. Maybe that's why I haven't joined any others. Oh and I try to get early-reviewer books, but haven't been lucky yet. Cross your fingers.

I added a widget to my blog awhile ago after seeing one of the other girls here do it. I copied. So sue me. But in case that's too time consuming you can also go here to look at my books.

I think it would be useful for the library to have a place where people could look at recently added books or see what the librarians are reading, but it would take waaaaaaaay to much time and effort to enter all of our books, even with a scanner.

Thing 11 - Tagging and del.icio.us

I've been tagging all of my posts as I've been going along, so that was pretty easy. I've also used tags for some other sites (such as LibraryThing). That was actually my favorite part of del.icio.us. I don't think I'll use the site for reference, since there're only a few sites that we use consistantly and those are already bookmarked on Mozilla, but hoo boy! it was funny to see the connections for between me and random other people who look at the same websites as I do. The tagging of my LibraryThing is pretty standard (I used subject headings) so that it would help me recognize Dewey numbers better since I'm still new at this whole library business. For my blog posts, I've been incredibly random. I've found that the randomness isn't quite as useful, but is a lot of fun. And as long as you have a few serious tags, what difference does it make?

BTW, did anyone else have a hard time getting the dots right in del.icio.us