It's My Life

Right now, my Twitter is pretty basic. Some of the followers reflect my personality. Other than following one of my friends, there are a few other followers from more things on a stick. I'm following on the latest UK news, Obama, and I started following secrettwitter.

Here's my Twitter Badge:

I used the site TweetSnap to create this badge, absolutely easy.

Anyways, I think there is enough of basic information for others that share my similar interests that if they so choose to follow me, then so be it. But... with all this hype with Twitter, I'm still wondering why I really want to bother. It is just something else for me to log into.

I'm still a beginner with this Twitter thing, I'll do more exploring, there is just so much out there...

1. How have you been using your RSS reader? Do you read it regularly?
I honestly have not used my RSS reader much. I really have spent as much time to really see how effective it would be for me. So, I don't use it nor do I read it regularly.
2. How have you organized your feeds? Does that help you keep up?
When I set up feeds the first time around, I don't think I bothered to organize any of it. If I did I know it would help keep up with any news and such for my personal interest. I really should have, when UK hired Calapari for head coach, it would have made searching these other news sources a lot easier... just scan the headlines in one spot.
3. Which features of Delicious do you use most--beyond bookmarking?
4. Do you have recommendations or suggestions for using either of these tools?
Take the time to really dig into these. Delicious is awesome to use, spend time organizing it.

Google has such neat apps and feature.

To start with I choose to look into Google Alerts. I set up two for the time being. I wanted some news on the Kentucky Wildcats and on country music and my fave country duo group, Montgomery Gentry. This was very easy to do and to customize each one. Everything I have set for news, sent to my email, and to check for once a week.

For productivity tools I choose Gmail. I'm always interested in what I can do to customize the interface and what neat tools that I can use to make the experience much better. I only have a couple of lab features turned on; I'll need to go in and tinker with those some more. I like that I can easily select the emails that are school/course related, family, etc. and save those for future reference. I did look at Google Sites, I browsed through some sites that people have created to see how they were putting things together. I may actually put a family one together...

I looked at the Google Health... WOW. I'm not really sure what to think about it. Ones health is personal and should only be discussed between the patient and doctor and whoever else the patient decides to go into detail with...like a spouse. I would be afraid to put in too much info and someone hack Google and acquire this information.... But it would be nice that much of our health information was electronic in like a national database(isn't this one Obama's to do list?) that if I'm visiting family in Kentucky and something happens, they (Ky) doctors could access my medical records with the few keystrokes and a click of a mouse.

I have iGoogle set up for my homepage and I use so many other Google apps that it's nice that everything is under one roof. However, I did take a look at Pageflakes, which is really cool too.

Either one, I found really easy to set up and add gadgets too, delete those you don't want and move around on your page. Even setting up my gmail account on Pageflakes was easy.

On my iGoogle I have some of the following gadgets: Gmail, some news on UK sports and Kentucky news, top stories, hangman, Rolling Stones, DVD releases, All Recipes, my local weather, a calendar and clock and more.

On my PageFlakes: Facebook, gmail, Topix, Suduko, CNN news, Country Music news, sports news, similar gadgets as to what I have on iGoogle.

As for useful gadgets, news is a top one to have and email too. I haven't explored too many more gadgets, but if there is a gadget for DVD releases, then there must be a gadget for books and music releases, those would be useful to a library user. But it is easy to get caught up in exploring the themes and gadget these.

Ok... I'm not completely sold on Twitter. Since I already use Facebook and Myspace and both of those offer status updates and more, Twitter seems like I'm doing the same thing, but with less interaction.

I'm still looking for this Twitter badge.

I'll probably come back to this one again after some more exploring it, but like I said, I'm not sold yet..

I signed up for Ning sometime ago. I actually belong to a number of the Ning communities: MyShutterspace, College 2.0, Library 2.0, and 23 Things on a Stick. I use MyShutterSpace more so then some of the others... I need to get more involved in the library related ones. I'll soon have my B.S. completed and will and would like to consult with more media specialists in the state of Minnesota.

So, in search of finding a poll widget that meets what I'm looking for, I may have found one. I visited MyStudiyo and found the setup a little confusing, but it wasn't all that much of a headache. Creating an account was short and sweet. None of this waiting for an email and clicking the link blah, blah stuff.

I think I may have to, whenever I want to add an interactive photo rating, I'll had to make individual blog posts. I'm not sure it that's what I want to do. I thought I can add a blog widget and that be in HTML code. I have some playing around to do later...

Anyways, I'll see how this works. Here's a go at it...

Well, widgets can be addicting. That's about all I can say. There are so many to choose from and so many that are neat that it I can see how easy it would be to overload the blog and having nothing but widgets.

I added a clock, UK news, and a photo widget that I'll use to display my photos, I'd like to rotate a photo on a weekly rotation and add a poll ratings too for the photo. I'm in search of a widget that I like specifically for that purpose.

These widgets I added right from blogger, which to me is easier instead of creating accounts with various sites. It's hard enough to remember passwords, I have a hard enough time remembering the password to do any online banking... ;). Plus, my gmail is so full of email from I don't know how far back, that I need to do some housekeeping on that. Maybe if I ever get that cleaned up and then create the tabs needed for some of these neat separate sites, might make keeping up with different passwords a little easier of a task.

I haven't posted anything in a long time... I'm on maternity leave after giving birth (well c-section) on December 30. She was a breeched, 9 pounder. I'm still taking courses, but should have my bachelors completed by the end of this year.... YEA!!!! In looking ahead to "More Things on a Stick" I'm looking forward to the widgets and tech fun!

Here's a picture of Kiley Jules...