Monday, November 30, 2009

Moved to Wordpress

Having had trouble with a personal blogger site (it was flagged as a spam blog by their alogarithms on or before 9th Nov and still - 30 November - hasn't been reinstated) I investigated WordPress. Again. I'd looked at WordPress when doing the Library 2.0 course but was well-ensconsed as a Blogger user but this recent problem has galvanised me into action. I found out how easy it is to export your Blogger posts and import them to WordPress so I gave it a try and now have a not very excitingly named Heidi's Test Blog over at WordPress and will be posting the rest of my Library 2.1 findings over there so you might like to redo your links, RSS feeds, etc.

Signing out of here

Heidi

Monday, November 16, 2009

Library 2.1 Week 4 - Evaluation


Google Alerts and Feedburner. I've done them for Readers in the Mist but am not sure why I have done so - my evaluation of this module will have to wait until there is something to report.


I don't think this was a very well explained module.

Library 2.1 Week 3 - Delicious

You can't make me use the Delicious thing! I'm feeling very naughty and defiant here but am going to skip this lesson (I can always revisit at a later date, can't I?). I did set up an account when doing Library 2.0 and put a whole load of sites on there which I then deleted them from my Favourites - and haven't used them since.

As with Twitter I can see they are potentially really useful, especially for RA or Reference work, but you'd need to get a large no. of staff on board so one person is not the only one doing all the work and our staff -especially the branch staff who are the ones who know best what customers want - just don't have the time.

Library 2.1 Week 2 - Twitter


I'm not keen to do the Twitter thing on a personal basis. I've got a blog and Facebook and feel that that's enough. In fact, I've not been in the Facebook thing for a while and posted anything for a while - I'm getting bored with it I think and can't think of anything interesting to say. And that's the trouble with Twitter as I see it, for individuals; who, except your nearest and dearest, wants to know all the ins and outs of your life - going for a cuppa now, phew got the vaccuming done at last . . . And so much time could be spent updating blogs, twitter, Facebook, etc. (especially on the really slow connection I have at home) that you don't spend time face to face with your nearest and dearest which is ALWAYS nicer.

However, I can see that for Libraries it is a very useful tool - a quick way of getting a message out and, with links back to the blog which may have more information, an idea to pursue . . .

Monday, November 2, 2009

Done it!

Things not going well this afternoon. I had kept a screen dump of my old template but didn't save it and I've lost it now.

This is my second attempt and my second choice for a template. I was going to use Blogy-Styleicious because, as well as liking the colour, it has several tabs; I'd really like to have more than one front page to my blog. But the tabs link to something else entirely and I don't know how to make them link to stuff created by me - can anyone help?

Anyway, this is nice for now.

Phew! Thought I'd lost it

I've decided I'm going to give the next SLNSW 2.1 thingy a go. I've read the first couple of posts about blogging but I've ground to a bit of a halt . . . for the moment.

I've been blogging for some time now and love it. I do most of the blogging for the Blue Mountains Library blog, Readers in the Mist, and really enjoy myself with it. I get most of my blog post subjects from other blogs I read via the Bloglines RSS feeder or from the LISNews emails I get via my inbox. There are a couple of regular contributors who send stuff to me to re-jig for the blog and I email other staff each month for What library staff are reading . . . chocolate bribes get me contributions for that one. There are one or two other authors but they don't post often. I wish others would do more, it would make it all the more interesting for our readers. And there have been over 10,000 since February 2008 when we started the blog. Really pleasing that.

I also blog privately with a blog for sharing stuff with family and friends overseas and here in Australia and one for one of the two book groups I belong to - again I have yet to convince the others to have a go contributing much to that one. Blogs are a great way to review meetings and keep each other informed about next meeting venue, reading lists, good booky websites and other blogs. My other book group uses Yahoo groups for this kind of thing - it works quite well too although is less visually appealing and links and photos within posts are not possible.

Today I thought I'd give the adventure bit a go and download a new template for my blog. I've followed the instructions but am not sure I'm doing it right - either that or our IT restrictions are stopping me. Anyway, I have taken enough time on this today and am resolved to give it another go at home.