Week 5 Inquiry

For the last week I have gone along, happy as a clam, thinking I had kept up with all of my Project Play assignments when, suddenly, I took a look at my actual blog today only to discover NO POST from week 5. That's right folks, until just a few moments ago the post you may read below did not exist here. In fact that post was living on my personal blog, confusing family and friend alike! Thankfully I was able to move it over here but what happened? My troubleshooting process was this:

1. Verify that my flickr account is set up to post to this blog. Check
2. Try another post from flickr to this blog. Check
3. Return to this blog and see the new post from flickr. Nope!
4. Visit my personal blog again to check for new post from flickr. Check
5. Repeat steps 1-4, triple checking that I am selecting this blog to post to and not my other, personal blog Check, and still no flickr post here.

For some wacky reason, any blog post I try to make from flickr is going onto my personal blog, despite the fact that I have added this ProjectPlay blog to my flickr account's blog list and am choosing it to blog to. If anyone out there knows what might be going on, please do fill me in.

I think its time to move on to Project Play Week 7.

Snow in October

Bet that title caught your attention! This is a photo of the library taken quite a while ago, in about January of 2006 I believe. I thought it a fitting one to share in this episode of my Project Play blog.

I have been using flickr for a couple years as a way to share the abundance of photos I take of my pets with family and friends near and far; however, until this assignment I hadn't really thought about flickr as a tool that could be used by the library. I could see a flickr badge on a library's website as a great way to show site visitors all of the different materials, displays, programs, etc. available at the library. The challenge would probably be, as usual, designating a staff person or finding a volunteer to make time to keep the pictures fresh, up-to-date, and interesting. If my library creates a public blog, I think a flickr account would fit hand-in-hand, allowing staff bloggers to attach images to their posts. My least favorite thing about flickr is that if one uses the blog entry tool from within flickr (as I am doing now), you loose the ability to do creative formatting of your post such as embedding links to other blogs & sites and changing your font color and size.

If you havn't tried this already, two fun searches to try in flickr are your library's name (to see what kind of photos of your library people are posting) and you or your pet's first names (to see who else in the world has the same name). On a search of my library's name, I found a great close up shot of the fish tank in our children's room!

Week 4 Inquiry

When checking out other Project Play-ers sites to comment, is anyone else having an issue with a pop-up that says "Allow subframes to navigate across..." that just keeps popping up whether you click no or yes? This doesn't happen on all of the blogs I've looked at but on a few and it is annoying!

I'm all for moderation...

...of comments on this blog, that is. Following the handy-dandy instructions on the Project Play Week 4 assignment made this quite simple. I find Blogger fairly easy to maneuver through; however, someday I'd like to learn more about html so I could change the look of my page without using the "easy buttons".

So, fellow Project Play-ers, comment away! Here are some questions for you or you can click here to take the survey monkey version:

1. Is your library currently doing or considering a blog for the public?
2. If so, what staff positions will be responsible for maintenance of the blog?
3. What staff will be responsible for posting information to the blog?
4. Will your staff be blogging while staffing a public service desk or will they be given "off desk" time to complete blog-work?

The Hunt for RSS Feeds

My original goal to post weekly about my Project Play experience has already gone by the wayside since it is definately not Tuesday anymore. I feel like I've already broken one of the main objectives (or should I say directives? rules? does blogging have rules?) of blogging that we learned last week - that they are updated very regularly to keep relevant and current. What can I say - RSS threw me for a bit of a loop. And I already had a Bloglines account with many feeds that I set up long before this lesson!

I decided to begin with the account I had for the Adult Services Staff at my library. I worked on sorting out the feeds into different folders and arranging the folders. Did anyone else find it a bit clunky to work in "edit" mode? I had some problems when I had many folders open and wanted to move a feed from one folder at the top of my list to somewhere near the bottom. Eventually I figured out that I should close all the folders that I wasn't currently using to make organization go more smoothly (or, truly, to go at all!). I also had some initial confusion with changing the sorting from "manual" to "a-z". Really, what librarian is going to sort her feeds any old which way...bring on order I say! I finally figured out that you should click on the title of your folder, then change the sort option up at the top, then click on submit. But enough about sorting.

I then created a new account just for me and began adding feeds from those suggested at Project Play Week 3. I wonder if anyone else has noticed that some of the feed links can be difficult to find? For example, the feed from the New York Times Articles about Libraries and Librarians took me forever to find. (Hint - scroll almost to the end of the page and then scroll over to the right side...could this need to scroll to the right be due to how my browser window is set up?! I really don't know.)

Next I moved over here to my blog and decided to test out the differences between adding types of Page Elements like "Link List" or "Feed" in the Layout section of Blogger versus a Blogroll from Bloglines as HTML or JavaScript. Would these look and work the same? A resounding no. The Feed option allows you to add just one RSS feed to your blog at a time, with each one a unique "page element" while the Link List can include both websites and blogs and will display in a list format (doh, probably why they call it "link list"). I decided NOT to go with either of these options and instead just added two blogrolls instead - one of fun feeds and one of library related feeds.

Overall I think week 3 was very informative and I'm glad I had an incentive to more deeply explore RSS and readers. Now I just have to work on not feeling guilty about clicking the "mark all read" feature more often than I probably should.