Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Thing #30 More ways to use RSS and Delicious

Yes, I feel guilty about my RSS feeds - each time I go into Google Reader there are hundreds of "unreads". And I have tried to keep the feeds manageable. Now I've fed my blog to Twitter! I think Traffic.com would be great if I lived in a large city - not much use to me in northwest MN. I added rssWeather.com for the town closest to my lake home so I can keep track of potential weather threats there. Tabbloid is very cool - I think that would be fun to try.
I'll let you know about Delicious when I get that far - this is all for now. Bye.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Thing #29 - Google Tools

We are in the midst of a March blizzard so I thought this would be a good day to work on my Things. Let me say, I've learned something very important today: do not attempt to bake cookies while working on the Things. I burned most of them! Another thing I learned today: don't believe the weather widget - it says light snow and 6mph winds for Fisher - what a joke!
Google tools are great. I have the calendar on my iGoogle homepage and have added things like birthdays, anniversaries, team schedules, and some important school dates. I signed up for Google Alerts - I want to know anything about the author, Spring Warren (she wrote her first novel, Turpentine, last year - it's wonderful and I recommend it to all of you). I also signed up for a number of alerts at Alerts.com. I'm hoping my e-mail account doesn't go into overload.
Google Sites is a cool tool, not unlike PBwiki - could be very useful for a school project or adding info to my school library home page. And I was delighted to learn about Goog-411 - there have been many times when I could have used that tool (if only I'd known).

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Thing #28 - Customized Home Pages

Last year I set up an iGoogle page, so I decided to stick with it, making a few revisions. I deleted a number of widgets that I'm sure I wouldn't make use of (some games, some NFL sports, and some entertainment widgets) and added some new ones that I thought would be nice to have. I added Flicker, Facebook, Twitter, and a few new games. I already had GoogleTalk and GoogleReader - just clicked "as read" the 1,000+ unread feeds!! Okay, I'm busted - I haven't made much use of GoogleReader. When I set up my iGoogle page last winter, I didn't set it as my default home page - this time around I will do that so I'll be sure to make better use of it!