In the interests of continued learning, being open to new experiences, and needing something to write about for this Thing, I joined Pinterest. I can't say as it has won me over yet, although I haven't deleted my account either.
Okay, so Pinterest is still yet another way to save information. Saving information is a good and wonderful thing, but I don't need zillions of ways to do so, any more than I need three digital personal assistants, because then I have to remember which service is storing which bit of information. If I were more primarily visual, though, Pinterest might be my favorite information saver. The pictures are the focus and there's very little text involved. I could see using it if I were collecting ideas for a visual project, like how to redecorate a room, remodel my kitchen, or plan a wedding. But generally, I save things for the text more than the graphics, and I find Evernote or even Springpad better for that. Also, I think Pinterest is just messy. Faced with a screen of small pictures and little text, I can't find a focal point on the page and I mostly just want to click away from it, not use it. This is a service in desperate need of more white space.
Like Zite and Springpad, Pinterest wants to send new ideas my way. Since signing up, I've been getting regular emails from Pinterest encouraging me to follow some boards and find more things to pin. I'm becoming increasingly curious about what this says about people generally. Do we feel we don't know enough? Are falling behind somehow and need to catch up? Are just really curious about what the people we follow are up to? Anyway, even though this doesn't interest me, I'm sure it's a fine feature for those who want to take advantage of it.
I don't see myself using Pinterest professionally in the near future. I work at a law library: the kind of library infamous for having lots of books that look exactly alike. With Pinterest's visual emphasis, I don't know what exactly we could show off. An entire board devoted to books with tan covers and red and black stripes on the spines—ooh! :)
Showing posts with label organization. Show all posts
Showing posts with label organization. Show all posts
Sunday, April 6, 2014
Friday, March 13, 2009
Thing 28: Customized Home Pages
Well, this was hauntingly familiar. I'd dealt with customized home pages way back in August with Thing 13 (Online Productivity Tools). There seem to be a few more options out there this year, but the principle is the same.
Since Thing 13, I've been using iGoogle as my home page on my home computer. This time, I've been testing Netvibes and Pageflakes out as well. I want to like Netvibes more than I do, but it's been having small problems ever since I signed up. I had to sign up twice because it locked up the first time and my registration never went all the way through. Started simultaneously with Pageflakes, Netvibes takes noticeably longer to load which isn't much of a selling point, and sometimes it just doesn't load at all. And finally, something about the layout just rubs me the wrong way aesthetically. I've changed the template and colors, but it's still not to my taste. The various widgets do what they're supposed to do (mostly), but I find many of them unattractive anyway. I do like that they've got a fairly wide assortment of widgets, but iGoogle has more (so there).
Pageflakes' strong points are the things I didn't like about Netvibes: it loads faster, I like the layout better, and most of the time, with any given flake, I like its look more than Netvibes' corresponding widget. Its mail flakes seem to have more problems accessing my email than Netvibes' do, though. But at least I didn't have to sign up for it twice, and so far it hasn't had hiccups in loading.
I'm not quite ready to dump iGoogle yet. I may not like its layout quite as much as Pageflakes', but I find its basic simplicity appealing in its own right. And the gadgets I've found are mostly doing what I need them to do, although why the birthday reminder gadget occasionally just stops working puzzles me.
Some gadgets, regardless of platform, are just really useful. I like having my various email accounts viewable with a quick glance at one page, rather than traipsing around from login screen to login screen to check them all. I think Facebook and Twitter do just fine as small gadgets: it strips them down to their essentials and cuts out the noise (well, Twitter doesn't seem to have much beyond its essentials, but it still works great as a gadget--if you like it in the first place). And what's a start page without news headlines or brief weather updates?
Like giving Twitter a fair shot, I'll probably continue to try all these home pages for a while and see how they work out in the long run. There are always new gadgets/widgets/flakes to try, after all--may as well see them in three incarnations.
Since Thing 13, I've been using iGoogle as my home page on my home computer. This time, I've been testing Netvibes and Pageflakes out as well. I want to like Netvibes more than I do, but it's been having small problems ever since I signed up. I had to sign up twice because it locked up the first time and my registration never went all the way through. Started simultaneously with Pageflakes, Netvibes takes noticeably longer to load which isn't much of a selling point, and sometimes it just doesn't load at all. And finally, something about the layout just rubs me the wrong way aesthetically. I've changed the template and colors, but it's still not to my taste. The various widgets do what they're supposed to do (mostly), but I find many of them unattractive anyway. I do like that they've got a fairly wide assortment of widgets, but iGoogle has more (so there).
Pageflakes' strong points are the things I didn't like about Netvibes: it loads faster, I like the layout better, and most of the time, with any given flake, I like its look more than Netvibes' corresponding widget. Its mail flakes seem to have more problems accessing my email than Netvibes' do, though. But at least I didn't have to sign up for it twice, and so far it hasn't had hiccups in loading.
I'm not quite ready to dump iGoogle yet. I may not like its layout quite as much as Pageflakes', but I find its basic simplicity appealing in its own right. And the gadgets I've found are mostly doing what I need them to do, although why the birthday reminder gadget occasionally just stops working puzzles me.
Some gadgets, regardless of platform, are just really useful. I like having my various email accounts viewable with a quick glance at one page, rather than traipsing around from login screen to login screen to check them all. I think Facebook and Twitter do just fine as small gadgets: it strips them down to their essentials and cuts out the noise (well, Twitter doesn't seem to have much beyond its essentials, but it still works great as a gadget--if you like it in the first place). And what's a start page without news headlines or brief weather updates?
Like giving Twitter a fair shot, I'll probably continue to try all these home pages for a while and see how they work out in the long run. There are always new gadgets/widgets/flakes to try, after all--may as well see them in three incarnations.
Friday, September 5, 2008
Thing 17: ELM Productivity Tools
I knew about the Electronic Library for Minnesota before I started the 23 Things. It's been very useful now that I'm back in student mode--I love being able to get journal articles without having to take the time to go over to a library and I really don't miss trying to make photocopies from bound journals. However, I didn't know that the databases came with extras before playing with Thing 17.
I think EBSCO's Personal Folder feature will be really useful. It was a lot easier to save the articles for my current class to this folder instead of downloading them to a flash drive. After all, I never remember which flash drive I used and when you save an article to a computer, the file name is a meaningless string of letters and numbers--saved to the Folder, the file name is the article title. Although my high hopes for getting all my articles neatly organized and available from any computer crashed when I realized that one of the assigned articles was from another company's database. Oh well.
The Search Alert feature was less successful. Having dinked around with it for a few days, it looks like I can set up a successful RSS feed through IE7 or Outlook, which is fine when I'm at work. But I use Firefox 3 and Thunderbird at home, and I just couldn't get the RSS feed set up on either of them successfully. Oh, it looked like it was set up in Thunderbird (Firefox couldn't "see" the RSS feed at all), but whenever a new article came in and I clicked on its link, I was sent to a login page that wanted a username and password that I didn't have. If I tried, perhaps I could get this working on Google Reader, but like I said back at Thing 3, I don't want to use Google Reader. And it wasn't clear where I should go for help. My library? EBSCO?
I've had mixed feelings about NetLibrary for years. It's a great idea, but the books included seem to mostly be a random mixture of this and that. And once I've chosen a book, the layout strikes me as odd. Maybe I'm just wired for print books more than electronic ones! But I love the idea of being able to run keyword searches on books, not just journal and magazine articles, so I hope NetLibrary (and other variants of electronic books) continue to improve.
I think EBSCO's Personal Folder feature will be really useful. It was a lot easier to save the articles for my current class to this folder instead of downloading them to a flash drive. After all, I never remember which flash drive I used and when you save an article to a computer, the file name is a meaningless string of letters and numbers--saved to the Folder, the file name is the article title. Although my high hopes for getting all my articles neatly organized and available from any computer crashed when I realized that one of the assigned articles was from another company's database. Oh well.
The Search Alert feature was less successful. Having dinked around with it for a few days, it looks like I can set up a successful RSS feed through IE7 or Outlook, which is fine when I'm at work. But I use Firefox 3 and Thunderbird at home, and I just couldn't get the RSS feed set up on either of them successfully. Oh, it looked like it was set up in Thunderbird (Firefox couldn't "see" the RSS feed at all), but whenever a new article came in and I clicked on its link, I was sent to a login page that wanted a username and password that I didn't have. If I tried, perhaps I could get this working on Google Reader, but like I said back at Thing 3, I don't want to use Google Reader. And it wasn't clear where I should go for help. My library? EBSCO?
I've had mixed feelings about NetLibrary for years. It's a great idea, but the books included seem to mostly be a random mixture of this and that. And once I've chosen a book, the layout strikes me as odd. Maybe I'm just wired for print books more than electronic ones! But I love the idea of being able to run keyword searches on books, not just journal and magazine articles, so I hope NetLibrary (and other variants of electronic books) continue to improve.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Thing 16: Student 2.0 Tools
Oh, great timing. Here I am: a Student 2.0.
I first encountered the Assignment Calculator about a year ago, although I can't remember what brought it to my attention. I tried it for a paper that was due shortly after Thanksgiving. I suppose I can't blame the Assignment Calculator for the fact that I let myself get distracted by eating turkey and baking holiday cookies and ended up staying up the night before the paper was due, writing it at the last moment just like when I was in college. Plus, the Assignment Calculator is more organized than I am, period. It talks about creating an outline and a thesis statement before starting the first draft--I've tended to skip outlining altogether and my thesis statement is often about the last thing I come up with. If the U didn't create an Assignment Calculator for grad students because they thought grad students had matured and had their acts together...well, not necessarily.
The Research Project Calculator looks like an excellent idea. If you can keep any students from developing my procrastination habits while they're still young, their future professors will thank you. However, I can't imagine us getting any students here except law students, and most of them probably hang out at their school libraries. So I don't see us using the Assignment Calculator, much less the RPC. I suppose what we need (or what our pro se patrons need, rather) is a calculator that will walk them through the steps to file an appeal on schedule, including getting a brief written. The Appeals Calculator--doesn't that sound useful?
Well, for me, another semester starts next week, bringing more opportunities to use the Assignment Calculator. I really am trying to be better about outlining and sometimes I know what my thesis is before the end of the paper, so maybe I can get more practical use out of the Assignment Calculator.
I first encountered the Assignment Calculator about a year ago, although I can't remember what brought it to my attention. I tried it for a paper that was due shortly after Thanksgiving. I suppose I can't blame the Assignment Calculator for the fact that I let myself get distracted by eating turkey and baking holiday cookies and ended up staying up the night before the paper was due, writing it at the last moment just like when I was in college. Plus, the Assignment Calculator is more organized than I am, period. It talks about creating an outline and a thesis statement before starting the first draft--I've tended to skip outlining altogether and my thesis statement is often about the last thing I come up with. If the U didn't create an Assignment Calculator for grad students because they thought grad students had matured and had their acts together...well, not necessarily.
The Research Project Calculator looks like an excellent idea. If you can keep any students from developing my procrastination habits while they're still young, their future professors will thank you. However, I can't imagine us getting any students here except law students, and most of them probably hang out at their school libraries. So I don't see us using the Assignment Calculator, much less the RPC. I suppose what we need (or what our pro se patrons need, rather) is a calculator that will walk them through the steps to file an appeal on schedule, including getting a brief written. The Appeals Calculator--doesn't that sound useful?
Well, for me, another semester starts next week, bringing more opportunities to use the Assignment Calculator. I really am trying to be better about outlining and sometimes I know what my thesis is before the end of the paper, so maybe I can get more practical use out of the Assignment Calculator.
Friday, August 22, 2008
Thing 13: Online Productivity Tools
Toys! Whee!
I tackled the start page first. It's not that that sort of start page is new to me: my ISP (EarthLink) has had one like that for years. But there are lots of gadgets on it that I don't like that are hard to get rid of and the look is generally cluttered, so I was willing to try another one. I went with iGoogle's page because it had a nice clean look, figuring that I can always go back to EarthLink's if iGoogle starts to annoy me. It's a bit odd getting a peek into my Gmail account instead of my EarthLink email though, since Gmail is only one of my backups.
I would get a lot more out of these tools if I didn't already have a PDA. It takes only a few seconds to turn on the PDA and three minutes bare minimum to get a computer up and running. These online tools aren't much use for reminding me to do stuff that isn't computer-based (set the rice to soaking, return the library books). The PDA has problems in this area too--it doesn't really remind me of much if I forget to check it in the first place--although I can set it to sound an alarm as a reminder, which has been helpful.
That aside, many of these things looked useful. Google's calendar was more than adequate for the events I typed in to test it with. Remember the Milk seems to be getting lots of good reviews, but when I try to enter a task, it locks up. I'll try it from another computer, but how much use will it be if I can only use it on certain computers? Backpack was probably useful as all get-out, but it was overkill. Actually Backpack looks like it might be an equivalent to Microsoft's SharePoint Server, in which case, Backpack does a much better job of explaining itself than SharePoint does. We could probably use it at work except that we've already got SharePoint.
The sticky note programs look like they have potential. But because they need to be downloaded, I'm going to try them out at home first; our IT department frets about unapproved software being installed on our work computers.
I tackled the start page first. It's not that that sort of start page is new to me: my ISP (EarthLink) has had one like that for years. But there are lots of gadgets on it that I don't like that are hard to get rid of and the look is generally cluttered, so I was willing to try another one. I went with iGoogle's page because it had a nice clean look, figuring that I can always go back to EarthLink's if iGoogle starts to annoy me. It's a bit odd getting a peek into my Gmail account instead of my EarthLink email though, since Gmail is only one of my backups.
I would get a lot more out of these tools if I didn't already have a PDA. It takes only a few seconds to turn on the PDA and three minutes bare minimum to get a computer up and running. These online tools aren't much use for reminding me to do stuff that isn't computer-based (set the rice to soaking, return the library books). The PDA has problems in this area too--it doesn't really remind me of much if I forget to check it in the first place--although I can set it to sound an alarm as a reminder, which has been helpful.
That aside, many of these things looked useful. Google's calendar was more than adequate for the events I typed in to test it with. Remember the Milk seems to be getting lots of good reviews, but when I try to enter a task, it locks up. I'll try it from another computer, but how much use will it be if I can only use it on certain computers? Backpack was probably useful as all get-out, but it was overkill. Actually Backpack looks like it might be an equivalent to Microsoft's SharePoint Server, in which case, Backpack does a much better job of explaining itself than SharePoint does. We could probably use it at work except that we've already got SharePoint.
The sticky note programs look like they have potential. But because they need to be downloaded, I'm going to try them out at home first; our IT department frets about unapproved software being installed on our work computers.
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