Digitalist life in the library

26Feb/100

Things 9 & 10 – Social bookmarking

  • Thing 9: Sign up for a Delicious account, bookmark and tag some of your favourite web sites.
  • Thing 10: Add other Delicious users to your network so that you can easily view their bookmarks.

I have been using delicious now for nearly a year. I can't claim that I go back to it regularly to find things but I find it reassuring to know that I have some links to helpful tools and useful articles there in case I need them someday. I think the ones I go back for the most are those for web design, especially when I'm trying to find a funky colour to use.

The only way to manage your links in delicious is to use tags. It is so important to be consistent so I really like that you get recommendations from your own set of tags when you save a new link.

It was my job recently to move all of the library's links to free resources on the web over to delicious. Prior to this we had kept them on a page on our intranet but this was so unwieldy and made adding a new link extremely time consuming. The ability to tag the bookmarks makes it so easy to group like items and hopefully for our users to quickly and easily locate links of interest to them.

Before now I haven't ever used the network feature of delicious. For thing 10 I added two of my fellow 23 things team members. I find it odd that there's not a way to search for friends/colleagues on there by email address. Unless I've missed something adding people to your network relies on you knowing their username.

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25Feb/101

Sheldonian Man


Sheldonian Man
Originally uploaded by ekcragg

I took this photo of one of the stone heads outside the Sheldonian Theatre and had some fun with the effects in Picnik.

This is my favourite. At first I thought it made it look like he was shouting, but then I wondered if he might be sneezing!

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25Feb/100

Things 7 & 8 – Online photos

  • Thing 7: Create a Flickr account.
  • Thing 8: Edit images with Picnik.

I've been using Flickr for a few years now but have only recently upgraded to a Pro account which allows me extra functionality in terms of the organisation of my photos into sets and collections. It also means I have no monthly limit on my uploads. I used to upload all my photos to Facebook for my friends to see but my frustration with their uploader drove me to explore Flickr. Their desktop uploader is awesome and it's so easy to edit photos in batches on Flickr that really once you've started using it there's no going back.

This year I have taken on the 365 photos project. So far it's going well - I think I've only missed one day. Through this project I've started using the social features of Flickr much more to comment, tag and even add notes to highlight specific details in a picture.

Since moving to a Mac at the end of last year I have been editing my photos much more. iPhoto makes is really easy to adjust the exposure and tweak colours to add an extra clarity to your photos. Today I had a play with Picnik. I will post the results separately to make use of Flickr's excellent "Blog this" feature.

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