Where has Snowie lived?

I hope Tim doesn't mind my copying him, but I created a map of all the places I've lived after seeing his. It's not quite as long as his, but I think my move quotient is higher because I'm younger! Check it out.

Rolling Your Own

This makes me think of my mother's cousin Marvin, who is the only person I knew who still rolled his own cigarettes. We inherited a lot of cigarette papers and Prince Albert cans from him after he died! But in this case, rolling your own refers to making your own search engine that will search only the sites you tell it, using a site called Rollyo. I tried the default searches the site has, but nothing struck my fancy. So I decided to make my own search for Doctor Who news, using the top 5 Doctor Who news sites. It's here. It was somewhat useful, but very rarely did it find useful information for me from more than one of the sites at once. So I'm not sure how it would really save me time.

I can imagine using this for certain instructional situations. Students in a class on a specific topic are often given a list of "approved" sites to visit by their instructor. Instead, the professor could create a Rollyo search that automatically searches all the sites at once. That might save the students a little bit of time and make their searching a little easier.

LibraryThing

I created a LibraryThing account and added a few books to it. This is the one tool we've used so far that I'm the least interested in. The truth is, I don't own very many books at all anymore. After I became a librarian, I figured out that I could always get practically anything I wanted from the library, and they would store it for me during times I didn't need to use it! So I have probably under 100 books these days. They fall into three categories: cookbooks, Bee Gees, and Doctor Who. Those are the three things I'm really passionate about, I guess.

Snowie from Springfield

This is a Simpsons avatar I made for myself on the Simpsons site. You can make one too.

More about RSS feeds

To answer my question from last time, when I wondered how long it would take my blog post to show up on Bloglines, the answer was 10 hours. It seems like none of the Blogger blogs I added are showing up there very fast. Maybe it's just a quirk in the system? Other feeds from commercial sites seem to show up much more quickly.

The Salon feeds are working great, but I had to remove the Slate ones from my list. The same articles kept showing up as new over and over again. At first I thought it was just because they were updating them, but there's no way there could have been that many corrections to make! After a while I got suspicious and looked to see if other bloggers have noticed this problem, and the answer is yes. I finally just removed them, and I'll check Slate manually myself every day like I used to.

I did try several of the feed search services. The only one that I actually liked was the search feature within Bloglines itself. I went looking for Doctor Who feeds, and the first two were the two big Dr. Who sites, so I added them. It found a lot of Dr. Who blogs as well, but I didn't add them yet because I didn't want to drown myself. Then I tried the other sites and didn't find anything useful at all. I think the problem is that those sites search the posts within the feeds rather than just the titles of the feeds. So what I got from each of them was a list of sites that had either one post on Doctor Who, or else, more often, a sentence such as this: "The doctor who pleaded guilty to malpractice was sentenced yesterday." Not what I wanted at all!

I am finding that using Bloglines really does save me some time that I used to spend looking at the same old pages over and over again. Now I have more time to look at other things or, heaven forbid, actually do some more work!

RSS feeds

I've set up a Bloglines account and am experimenting with RSS feeds. I've known about them for years, but I've never really thought it would save much time to use them. There aren't that many blogs that I follow regularly, and it's not been a problem to figure out the schedule and check them once a day or week, as the case may be. But now that I've looked around, I'm surprised to find how many other sites besides blogs have RSS feeds, and how useful they can be. For instance, there's a certain columnist at Salon that I adore. I certainly didn't want to see every time they add something new to the whole site, because that would drive me bonkers! But I found out they have a lot of different feeds, including one just for her column. So I subscribed to it. I also added my own blog, and now I'll see how long it takes for this to show up on Bloglines.

Snowie the movie director

When I was in library school, we had to film and edit a little movie just to prove that we could do it. Now mine is up on YouTube, so I figured I should post a link to it here for extra credit. (We can get extra credit, right?) Anyway, you can watch it here. Enough time has passed that it doesn't seem as horrible as it once did, although I still notice several mistakes I made.