Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Playing with Generators






Well this is a tough one, there I was in my previous post going on about how great bloglines is (which i still strongly believe!) but then i began to play around with the generators - both totally awesome and great fun!

Anyway, since i'm studying journalism i figured i'd use a generator to make an article clipping (which looks quite authentic). I've written a small article about a Chocolate event that took place up in Emerald last Thursday. Author Suzie Wharton was there to talk about chocolate and also a bit about her book 'A Chocoholic Guide to Melbourne.' I attended the event with a few of my library friends, and we had a wonderful time discovering what good quality chocolate is about (being shiny, melting in your mouth, snapping when you bite it and also flavour). We were also quite full, having test-tasted so many Haigh chocolate samples (which were totally yummy - i strongly recommend the Haigh's dark chocolate!). Anyway, the generator requires that you not use real names so i had to change it a bit.

Also played around a bit with Library Thing, which is pretty cool. Although i think it needs more resources when trying to list all the books you've read because despite using Amazon there were some books that i've read which weren't listed. That was a tad disappointing. But aside from that, the sites pretty good. Great for people who read way too many books to keep a track of!

Saturday, July 19, 2008

The beauty of Bloglines!





What an awesome idea! A website that tracks all the latest updates on your favourite websites and provides the updates all on the one site. Genius!

I have just signed up with Bloglines which does just that and I am loving it! I've also discovered what on earth RSS feeds are (basically special buttons which allow you to track updates on a website - a bit like an informal subscription to the website). So now, instead of travelling to each of the individual sites, I can keep track on everything that's going on! I think this has been my favourite exercise yet. I can't get over it!

Below is the link to my Bloglines site. Some of the sites that I now receive feeds from include The Age, Al-Jazeera, Unshelved (where the comic strip is from), Quicksand (totally awesome and worth checking out if you're reading this!), BBC News, New Scientist and Librarians' Internet Index, just to name a few.

http://www.bloglines.com/public/Chocoholic

Also I've decided that since my blog url is chocolate and books I should make some reference to them in each post.

Today's chocolate indulgence is Darrell Lea's White Rocky Road Chocolate. I'm not one for white chocolate, but my mother is and she bought a bar of it yesterday and it was so nice! It has a crisp coconut base, marshmellows, peanuts and lots of white chocolate! Yummy!

Tuesday, July 8, 2008

Flicker without the E!




Alright, so i've fallen pretty far behind now. And exams are over, so I have nothing to hide behind now, and subsequently I'm going to try my best to finish Learning 2.0 as best I can. Not because I merely would like to finish it in time, but because I have a commitment to make to Quicksand and myself.

I'm up to Week 3 now. I've just become a member of Flickr (which I only realised, while typing it into my blog title, has no 'e'). I've also just uploaded some photos of Lebanon following my recent trip there early this year. The photo I have here is of the Temple of Bacchus in Baalbek, Lebanon. Many people think of the war when they think of the country Lebanon. But there's so much more to it, so much beauty. Lebanon still has many ancient roman ruins left, but the Temple of Buccus is my favourite. Hmm, I'm having trouble trying to upload my photo from Flickr to my blog! Well I will readily admit that technology and the internet isn't exactly one of my strengths. Anyhow, instead I've uploaded the photo from my computer, and will add the link to Flickr just below. I might ask someone how to do this (and yes, I already tried using Help - i often find that computer help files aren't really all that helpful).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28371396@N03/2648721591/

Anyway I'm enjoying going through the little slideshow of my photos on the right-hand side there on Flickr. I searched for Casey-Cardinia, i found a number of wonderful photos! There's even pictures of the Bollywood Dance photos, which a bunch of us from the library attended! Good times!

Well that's it for now.
Peace out,
Rafah