Rollyo rollup, rollover and beg

Initially I thought this was great when I read the FAQs and blurb about what Rollyo could do. I thought this would be a great way of saving favourite links when you are away from your home computer. However, I was in for some disappointments: I followed the instructions and created a customized lists of links, but my page did not have a name. Just found out that to create a named page you have to create a link, so here it is: http://rollyo.com/darkcrystal/automotive_specs/ . Got so excited when it finally worked, that I created another list: http://rollyo.com/darkcrystal/manic_volcanic/. Now I can access my favourite web pages from any internet-connected computer.

Library Thing

Was fascinated reading the information about Library Thing. It was exactly what I was looking for as an aid to listing my growing library at home. Have started adding some of my books to the list, but it may take some time.... (I wonder if I will be prepared to pay if I find I have more than 200 books?) Like the way you can search the various libraries of the world for the book (noted that the National Library of New Zealand was not one of them, though). Here's my Library thing page http://www.librarything.com/catalog/darkcrystal. It's great how many fields you can fill in with other personal information, e.g. in my case, I have met some of the authors of the books, and have made a note there is an autograph inside. The tags also allow you to view other books of a similar subject.

Image generating

The "League of Bone" band members from top to bottom: Petal, Boon, Alfie, Jess and Mac

What fun to play with more pics! Just coming back from holiday from the Gold Coast, Australia, and was inspired with this site: http://www.neonmirrors.com/custom/ to create neon signs. I've included the picture I created to the left. I also went back to a site I discovered with the Flickr exercise, and created this movie poster(far left). (I hope this is not going to be prophetic!). Using a link given in The Generator Blog, I created a Death Metal Band name http://www.generatorland.com/display.php?id=69 Mine is "The League of Bone", and here are the band members: Mac, Jess, Alfie, Boon and Petal which I created using the Doppelme Avatar Generator (one of the links in The Generator Blog)

Week 4 RSS feeds

I seem to be fluctuating between enthusiasm and feelings of "numb brain-ness" with this new technology. I hope enthusiasm wins the day, though. It seems to be taking me much longer than most people to get a handle on how to do these things. Frustration is a constant companion.
I looked at the newsfeed search sites, and found none that I really liked to use. Feedster search seems to take you to individual RSS posts, but when you go to the site there is no opportunity to find the RSS link to similar material. Similar things happened to me when I tried Syndic8 (boy is it slow!!!) and http://www.blogger.com/www.completerss.com (as mentioned in one of the tutorials). Only dawned on me that the search engine finds the feed but not the link to find feeds of a similar topic. Topix was the only search site that instantly appealed (mainly because RSS feeds are clearly labelled at the bottom of the page, but apart from general New Zealand news, nothing really appealed.)
To find RSS feeds, I mostly went to my favourite web pages, and looked for an orange box indicating a RSS link. Amazed at how many RSS feeds are available out there, and that they can be called different things, e.g. XML , ATOM
Tried searching for "RSS feeds" using Google. Had a look at Solarwarp http://www.solarwarp.net/ which lists topics in a directory format. I dipped into some of these and once again found the actual feed item, rather than a link to the subject. Reading the feed itself does not provide you with a link to other similar feeds. Could someone offer a tip please? How on earth do you find an RSS feed for a subject?
Tried once again using Google and typed as a search "Rss feeds" library. This seemed more promising. Had a look at the New York Public Library, which is using RSS feeds ( http://www.nypl.org/rss/ ) for keeping customers up-to-date with library events and news. I tried searching for some librarian humour as a feed, but got into some very dodgy sites!!
Set up a Bloglines account to record some feeds, but not sure how to attach them to my actual blog. Perhaps as a link to the blog? This is the web page address which appears when I log in: http://www.bloglines.com/myblogs. However, when I'm not logged in, this does not take you to my page, so I have added a screen shot of my page (and scanned it to a jpg) to show the feeds at the top of this rant.

Another thing:

I tried attaching an RSS feed to my blog (Consumer product recalls), adding a Feed element, but this did not seem to work as successfully as Bloglines. See the Consumer product recall alerts. This was done several days ago, and have just made the same link to Bloglines, and already there are two more product recalls which haven't appeared on the link on my blog.

Flickr mashups and technology rant

Well, some of those mashup tools are not very intuitive. I tried to create a mosaic using Montagr (thinking of course that a mosaic would be made up of several images), but ended up with a single image to email. Not very satisfied with that, so looked around for something else to play with. Attempted to make a cube, but on entering the site (bighugelabs) it wanted me to sign up with another account (wouldn't accept my Flickr account). Didn't want to go through having to remember another account sign-on name and password, so gave that a miss. Finally, I tried to create a poster/postcard. This seemed fairly successful. (Hope you don't mind, Jo, that I borrowed your picture.) The result is up top.

Technology rant: This was hidden in the previous Week 3 post (remember the problem with pics?)

Week 3 Flikr experiences

I joined up to a Flickr account, but found that I had to have a Yahoo email. Grrr.... and it took ages to create, and I couldn't use my gmail account name, as this had already been taken in Yahoo. Double grr.... I now find I have to have a notebook with all my different account names ... and computers are supposed to make life easier?

Talking about more technology gripes: My digital camera is driving me crazy! Not only do I have trouble downloading my pics, but when I look at them on the computer, the pictures are always too dark, (even though they look OK on the camera screen) and I have to fiddle with them in edit to make them presentable e.g. the one on the left is the original, only being edited to resize it for the web.

The one on the right has been recontrasted and brightened to have some semblance to what it should look like. And I have to do this for just about all my pictures with this camera. I really need a new one now!!

I added two photos to my Flickr account with a tag ACL Learning 2.0 so you can find them easily. One is from Pompeii, the other of White Island. If you think they look familiar, you have probably seen them on the ACL natural disasters (volcanoes) web page. It was fun looking through other people's photos on flickr, checking other tags to see what pictures are out there.

3 October addenda: I have just looked at the Flickr page, and on entering ACL Learning into the search box could not find my photos, even though I added these words to my tags. Found Marilyn's pictures, though. Can't understand this, and don't know what I have done wrong.