Wiki-Wiki

The first wiki I visited was the Glee wiki. It was about the television show Glee on Fox. The wiki includes information on the show, including music featured on the show, pages about the show characters (main, featured, and one-time) and episode recaps.

http://glee.wikia.com/wiki/Glee_TV_Show_Wiki

The next wiki I visited was about the Irish City of Dublin. There was information in this wiki that would be useful for tourists, such as some popular places to visit and historic sites. There was also information on hotels and methods for traveling around in the city.

http://travel.wikia.com/wiki/Dublin

The third wiki I visited was one about Greek mythology. Actually, it was about using Greek mythology in gaming. It gave basic information about Greek myths, including lists naming many characters found in Greek mythology. Almost every character listed had a link that would give more information; however the ones I clicked on didn’t have any page content.

http://arcana.wikidot.com/greek-mythology

RSS Feeds

I know that RSS is a way to stay current with information that interests you, without having to constantly visit websites which may or may not have been updated. There are a couple ways to locate an RSS feed. What I found was the simplest for me was to copy the RSS link location by right-clicking on the button within the (Firefox) toolbar, and then pasting it into the “Add Subscription” box on the Google Reader page. I subscribed to the Google “News” feed bundle.

I didn’t really like the Google Reader or its interface. Even though I regularly use gmail, I didn’t like the big boxes that were on the screen (especially the ones that had a headline, small text and a huge add within the box.) I would have liked it better if it had been more like the Google News page, where it just lists the headline and a the first few sentences of the article in a small amount of space. Maybe I would like it if I used it more often, but right now the few RSS feeds I subscribe to go into my Microsoft Outlook and that system works for me.

I selected the Traffic/Transportation feed on the Mercury News site. And I was able to successfully locate all of the RSS buttons and add them to my reader. The only one that gave me trouble was the National Weather Service website, because I didn’t realize you had to choose a link within the site and then subscribe to that particular link.

Flickr and Me

Flickr is something that is also new to me. Even though I was peripherally aware of it, it was something I hadn't explored in the past because all I knew of it was that it was posting pictures on the Internet. Since I don't really take that many photos and I consider the ones I do take to be private, it didn't seem like it was something I would enjoy.

I still can't say that I enjoy it, or that I would use it in the future, but I get why people like to use it. It has some cool features, like the cloud tags, that let you quickly see things of interest. And it's cool that it allows you to publish (some) other people's photos on your blog, so that you can share the things that interest you with others. I'm glad for the exposure to it, but like I said, I probably won't be using it outside this class.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/50022405@N02/

Purple

cooler master dream iii
Originally uploaded by jerrrm

Never thought the back of a machine could look so...interesting.

Night

Originally uploaded by Eight19

This is a great night shot of what is apparently the capital building in Atlanta. Lovely.

Assignment No. 1

I found the experience of using Blogger to be incredibly easy. Navigating the interface was pretty self-explanatory, so I didn't have any problems there. At first, I stuck to just changing some of the colors on the template that I used. Then I realized that I could add things to the layout, so I added a search function and a picture. After 30 minutes of searching on Google, I gave up trying to add music to my page. That will have to wait until I become a little more advanced.

I have seen many different blogs (many, many different blogs) and I could never understand why anyone would want to blog. It seemed boring to me, especially since all the ones I had seen were concentrated on news or some other non-fiction content. But I recently saw a friend's blog where she had created this whole fictional character and now I get it. THAT is something that would be interesting to me, and something that I might work on to create.

Honestly, I wasn't really interested in the example blogs. I don't really read news or political blogs; I prefer to get my news from Anderson Cooper and the Mercury News. :-) Most of the non-fiction blogs that I've liked dealt in content that interested me, like the business side of writing.

Dancing not running

Dancing on air planes is much better than running with scissors.