A Month Away

All right, I don't know where March went, but I do know that it was extremely busy (not to mention the late season snows). Anyway, its time to get back in the saddle and finish the rest of the Things. One thing I have been doing more with is RSS feeds. I'm finding the time spent with the rss reader much more productive than wading through all the different web pages I used to visit. Plus, I've found a few other fun sites to subscribe to. One is from one of my sons, who has his artwork posted on mnartists.org. Its a fun site to explore and see what's out there in the local art world. Here's one of my son's drawings, more appropriate for last month, but fun all the same.

At the Beginning of Thing 4

Some first impressions of Flickr. I took the tour of the site and pretty much decided that I need to back up my photos online. I've done this in the past by burning CDs, but those are starting to pile up and they really don't give you a way to organize and find what you're looking for. I've also got them backed up on two different external hard drives, but the same issues of organization and searching apply. So it looks like I'll set up an account, figure out what should be private and public and go from there.

I was intrigued by the St. John's/St. Ben's site and can see a possible application for photos I've taken of some past exhibits. We'll see about playing around with that a bit.

I did a search of photos with the keywords "Sherlock Holmes" (which made some sense as I'm responsible for one of the largest Holmes collections in the world). There were thousands of images, which I was able to cut down a bit by just searching the tags. Even then I had over 900 images. I looked at some of them as a slide show, but realized a bit into the show that it would be better to look at these at work, on a computer that has a little faster connection then my DSL at home. Still, it was interesting and I'll probably explore and search some more. It was also interesting to see photos that were clearly scanned from another (copyrighted) source, with no credit given for the original photographer or rights holder. Seems like there's a bit of an issue there.

I've been playing and exploring for a couple of hours at home, so I think I'll call it quits for the moment and pick it up tomorrow. Besides, I see that I've got 40 items in my RSS reader, so I'll check those out before logging off.

Finished With Thing 3

Done with Thing 3. I checked out the additional resources, played around with some of the search possibilities and now its time to move on to Thing 4. I've got six feeds on my reader and no doubt will add more. I have found it a very productive way to get the information I need in one spot without hopping from site to site. One of the things I'm interested to learn is how to set up your own feed. I'm thinking, for instance, that when I update an online bibliography it might be useful to some people to get those updates as an RSS feed. Obviously, something else to explore and maybe add to my list of questions. Onward and upward.

Things On A Stick Northwoods Style

OK, I have to admit, the weather was just too nice this weekend and I had some long sticks on my feet, sliding through the beautiful snow of the Minnesota north woods. But before I left, I set up my reader and subscribed to some RSS feeds on the NY Times, Star Tribune, and Chronicle of Higher Ed. Now its time to check out some of the other Metronet blogs, add their feeds to my reader, and have a little more fun. I have enjoyed using the reader instead of going from web site to web site. I'll have to check out if some of the comics have RSS feeds. I'm sure at least some of them do.