Tuesday 9 August 2011

Light at the end of the tunnel?


At last ... Something that I can be enthusiastic about! Clearly I have been adding images to my blog before tackling this Thing, but just saving them from Flickr, then uploading them as found. This isn't exactly difficult, but sometimes it would be nice to have an easy way of choosing just a part of a picture, and, from my little bit of experimentation with this, Lightshot seems to make this easy. I took the above image from the many results of a Google search for "light end tunnel". Below is the result of acquiring the purple feather - minus all of the bits at the top or bottom of the screen, which show which programs and websites I have open at the moment ...



Sadly I can't install Lightshot as a stand alone feature. Too much security on my work computer.

Of course, having the ability to capture and edit images easily doesn't necessarily increase my need to do so, but I like what I've seen of this feature so far.

Wednesday 27 July 2011

More (T)wittering?


Photo by foxypar4 (via Creative Commons)

Oh, dear.

Extra Thing 2 is more on Twitter.

I subscribed to Twitter first time round. I posted, I think, two tweets, perhaps three (does one post tweets?). I subscribed to follow CILIP. They followed me back. I tried reading the many tweets that they produced. I got overwhelmed, especially as I was often required to follow links to websites to get anything out of them (the 142 character curse), and stopped. I don't have my own computer, and I don't have enough time to read them when I am at someone else's computer. So I have not looked at my Twitter account since then. Unfortunately this means that I have no use for Extra Thing 2's features. I have no tweets to archive, in one account, let alone more than one, or to future schedule, and I really don't think that the world needs to know that I've written another blog post. Especially if they are going to be at the level of this one ...

Am I allowed to be excused this Extra Thing?

Tuesday 26 July 2011

PS

... and I've changed the font and colour of my blog title!

Ironic olde worlde font for a 21st century exercise?

Beatification

I've now had a look at Extra Thing 1, and realise that I did some of it last time. I changed the background, and one or two other bits and pieces. I found that I had some gadgets/widgets added already, though I must confess that I can't now remember whether or not I added them, or they were there already. However, I've added one or two others to the foot of my page - statistics, a search box, and somewhere where all my fans can sign up to receive my blog posts by email. The world will be so much better for that. I searched for extra widgets, but didn't want any of the ones that I found. Why clutter my blog with things I will never use?

Oh dear, that sounds like a real cop out.



White rectangle

No idea why I see a small white rectangle over the credit for the photo - I don't see it in Preview ...

Oh, no ...


Photo by ihave3kids (under Creative Commons)

I signed up for Round 2 of 23 Things, thinking that as I was only going to be doing the Extra Things, I would keep up. Yes, definitely.

Errr ...

Post No. 1 one month late. Great start.

OK, I haven't quite done absolutely nothing. I re-read my blog from last year, and thought about what I had written (though I didn't commit my thoughts to 'paper'). I sound unconvinced about the necessity of any of the tools covered, though I can see that they have potential uses. Has this changed? Well, I haven't used any of the tools since completing the programme, which probably answers that question, but then my situation hasn't changed that much, so perhaps that is not surprising. I had to think about how to log into my blog. I haven't yet returned to my Google page.

So ... Extra Thing 1. Prettify my blog. I am actually reasonably happy with it as it is. It is simple, but readable. Will time spent on changing the template be worth spending? Do I need lots of gadgets or widgets? Not sure, but when I have a minute, I will have a look at what I can do.