66 Subscriptions!

For Thing 9 I did go in and add a few new subscriptions—new mysteries, sci-fi, and my account from SPL. Here's how the rest break down:

• 22 about work (including Google Alerts, feeds that we maintain, sites about social media and 6 twitter)


• 14 about knitting (including Stephanie Pearl-McPhee)


• 4 about books (including Unshelved and Neil Gaiman)


• 8 about home and misc (including Fluevog on twitter)


• 12 about SPL

The feed from My Account at SPL let me know when a hold was ready for pick up—several hours before the e-mail notification. I can see how this will quickly become a must-have on my feed list.

I would love to learn more about how the new books feed works.

Newsreader

I've had Bloglines and Google Reader set up for a while, now. (I don't remember why I left Bloglines, but it wasn't meeting my needs.)

While I have been using Google Reader, I would only look up how to do when the need arose--I have too many subscriptions, how do I make folders, etc.

For this thing, I took the time to read the help file and discovered tags. I now have individual messages tagged so that I can go back and take action on them, and learned how to share them with public pages, and add notes.

Technology

MakeUseOf

While I didn't get very far exploring some of the discovery resources for this task, I have been reading MakeUseOf for some time. It takes a bit to sort through, but once in a while, and by searching, it turns up some gems.

I found Renamer that way. Simple, easy, renames the files based on any parameters and configuration you can think of. Wonderful. I use it almost daily.

I also discovered Filemail through MakeUseOf. For when you need to send a file too large for e-mail but you—or the recipient—don't have access to FTP.

MakeUseOf is great because the programs featured are freeware, posts cover a wide range of platforms (win, mac, linux) and skill levels (beginning to advanced), and the contributors are from all walks of life.

Wow. I didn't realize that I'm a fan.

Flickr Fun

hockney1976731

I used the Hockneyizer from BigHugeLabs to alter this photo. It's a photo of the ocean because the water reminds me of Hockney.

Discover Flickr

pajaro...
Originally uploaded by 1030sw

Here's a photo of Antartica. Would be great for a vacation...

I learned a lot about Flickr for this task. I was able to set all of my photos to the Commons license for attribution only, learned that "no rights reserved" is not currently an option, and used the Explore tab to browse popular tags and recently uploaded images.

Habits are habit-forming

The easiest of the 7.5 habits for me is #3, to view problems as challenges. Everything has a solution and a way to get there that will improve us along the way.

The hardest is #7.5, to play. While I can recognize the importance of recreation to recharging creativity and energy, I still often treat it as a reward for work completed. And work is never finished.

27 things from an online antisocial

This is my attempt to participate in SPL's 27 Things challenge.

This will be a good course for me, because although I have worked in the Web industry for 10+ years, I have limited my personal exposure online. The audience is potentially everyone; how could I create and maintain a persona that could interact with any of them? What characteristics of myself would I not mind sharing with all of them? All of you? This process will help us find out.