Cycho Librarian

Once again I'm behind in my 23 Things , but this time I think I have a decent excuse ... Thing 11 is to investigate Library Thing  (I know, that's an awful lot of things for one sentence).  Well, according to my profile I apparently first investigated Library Thing on July 24th, 2006.  I have a sneaking suspicion I found out about it in one of my graduate school classes.  Apparently I went in and cataloged seven books that I had read recently, and then abandoned it.  It's not that I didn't see how this could be useful, it just didn't grab me for some reason. As I'm looking at my account now, I think I know why that happened.  First of all, the interface is really complicated.  There's too much to do on the main page of your account, and no obvious way to isolate just your books, or just your friends.  It puts everything that you can do on the site out there at once.  The thing is, I'm not using this site for all those other things.  I'm using it to t...

A quick post today on image generators for Thing 10 . First, my lovely new logo courtesy of CoolText . Next, just like everyone else in the world I created my own manga avatar . But I'm so attached to my current Triplets of Belleville avatar that I couldn't bear to replace it. So here's an excuse to share the manga one (since it came out so well, IMHO). Moral of this post? There's so many ways to manipulate images and text online, why bother with the software?

On we plunge into the wild and wonderful world of RSS feeds! I first discovered RSS feeds about 4 years ago when I was recommending an online comic I had discovered to one of our tech folks at the library. I was looking for library-related cartoons for a PowerPoint presentation and stumbled across a fun and quirky daily cartoon about a library called Unshelved . It spread like wildfire through my branch, with several of the staff going back and making our way through three years of archives to get caught up on the misadventures of the Mallville Public Library staff. After shooting the ones that we found especially funny back and forth by e-mail for a while, I thought it would be cool to share it on our staff intranet, so I sent the information off to the person in charge of the intranet. She responded saying that it looked like we'd be able to embed the RSS feed into the intranet. I had no idea what that meant, so I poked around. Turns out RSS is a Really Simple way to Syndic...