BlogBackupOnline

I took a quick look at PC World's 100 Blogs We Love and spied BlogBackupOnline (https://www.blogbackuponline.com/). It looked easy and free so I signed up. I didn't want to worry about losing my blog if Blogger had a failure or if I accidentally deleted it. (Deleting ones own blog by mistake seems to happen fairly frequently by the number of questions asking how to get it back (you can't) on the WordPress help forums.)

BBO was as easy to use as it looked, and is currently free. It also did a better job and was more robust than I anticipated. I added all four of my blogs to be backed up. BBO crawls each blog for a "full" back up when added for the first time, then daily backs up any changes, including comments, using your blog's RSS feed. It even allows you to upload your blog to another provider (say, if you wanted to move your blog from Blogger to WordPress). I signed up yesterday and today it did as promised and ran the daily back up. So far so good!

Margaret Boyd, Picasa, Gmail, and flickr, Oh My!

Margaret Boyd,
originally uploaded by hhdane_mom.

Assignment #6 More Flickr Fun

Oh boy! Picasa, Gmail, and flickr all working together! I found a post that explained how to send your photos from Picasa to flickr by emailing the images within Picasa using its Email button. It just so happened that I used my Gmail account to do it, but I had a choice of using my work account. Whatever is in the body of the email serves as the flickr tags, while the title of the email serves as the image title.

Margaret Boyd was the first female graduate of Ohio University, in 1873. Photo courtesy Boyd Family Collection, Mahn Center for Archives and Special Collections, Ohio University Libraries, Athens, Ohio

This image, though I'm guessing at the date of creation, is old enough to be teetering on the brink of being in the Public Domain. Since we don't know who took the photo it would fall into the category of unpublished anonymous and pseudonymous works or work made for hire (corporate authorship). In this category works are under copyright for 120 years from date of creation, so only works created before 1887 are in the Public Domain (in 2007). If we knew the creator of the photo, it would fall into the category of unpublished work which remains under copyright for the life of the author + 70 years--only works from authors who died before 1937 are in the Public Domain (in 2007). As you might now guess, unpublished works have a different schedule for entering the Public Domain. A wonderful reference on this is Peter Hirtle's page. Note that although I'm treating the image as PD, I'm still crediting/citing the repository.

Dori from flickr to You

Dori,
originally uploaded by hhdane_mom.

So now I'm experimenting with posting my images from flickr to Blogger. It's fairly easy too, but as flickr is not a Google product it took a couple of extra steps more than my Picasa to Blogger posting.

This is my youngest Dane, Dori.

eBay Widgets

Assignment #7 Blog About Technology

This is an eBay widget--it is very easy to create one to keep track of specific items or searches. This one is from my off-work life and shows the current sale items that I have on eBay for the Great Dane Rescue. On the work side of things, many archivists and special collections librarians use eBay as a means to procure new acquisitions in their collecting areas.

The eBay To Go page has a simple wizard to create one. Mouse over to see basic info, click for more details.

Seven and 1/2 Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners

Assignment #2 Lifelong Learning

OK, better late than never, I viewed the Flash movie this AM. I did take notes and I'm torn between which of the 7 1/2 are my personal hardest and easiest.

7 ½ Habits of Highly Successful Lifelong Learners

• Habit 1: Begin with the end in mind
• Habit 2: Accept responsibility for your own learning
• Habit 3: View problems as challenges
• Habit 4: Have confidence in yourself as a competent, effective learner
• Habit 5: Create your own learning toolbox
• Habit 6: Use technology to your advantage
• Habit 7: Teach/mentor others
• Habit 7 ½: Play

Probably #6 is my easiest as I definitely enjoy using technology to my advantage, and enjoy experimenting and learning new software and techniques. However, there is also technology/hardware out there that I don't use as it doesn't seem to be something I need. Take iPods for example--I'm either in front of my computer at work or in front of my computer at home. Either place I stream the music I like to listen to. No need to purchase (key word) an iPod then purchase the music and take the time to futz with it. BUT I still want that MP3 player that is our prize because it's FREE and quite versatile.

Probably #2 is my hardest: Accept responsibility for your own learning. I really enjoy learning new things and I've done a fair amount of on-line learning, but I hate certain parts of the process and don't want to do them. Class discussion whether F2F, in a blog, or in a forum I HATE and find it very hard to make myself do that piece. I'm having that problem with the shareable metadata course I'm taking. The instructors want us to comment on every little thing in the forum. :(

Picasa and Blogger

This is an experiment to see how the Picasa/Blogger interface works. Picasa is the Google desktop image management and Web sharing application. I use Picasa everyday to manage and search for my images both at home and at work.

At work I use Picasa to work with large numbers of images kept on the file server. At home I use it for images of the items I sell on eBay as a representative of the Great Dane Rescue. (You may say why not just use the thumbnail feature in Windows Explorer, but most of my images are large high res ones and the Windows "solution" doesn't work for them.)

Anyway, I found the Picasa/Blogger interface to work well and was quite easy! From Picasa select an image then just click on the Blogger button! After a log in screen it puts you right into Blogger and there you select which blog to add the image to, then compose the post.

Here's a photo I really like of my partner Dale and his dog Gidget sitting on our front steps in autumn 2005. Unfortunately Gidget is no longer with us.

Starting off Behind

Assignment #3 Create a Blog in 3 Steps
Assignment #4 Register Your Blog

Yes, I have set up my Blogger Learning 2.0 blog (on WordPress I already had a blog of my own plus my sister's and partner's that I administer), but no I have yet to begin the assignments. I'm finishing up an on-line course in shareable metadata. Once that's done, I'll take off on this thing. :)

flickr-ed

Assignment #5 Discover Flickr

Yes, I've finally been flickr-ed. So far I just have a few images of my pets up. I don't own a working camera or camera phone so I'm not "ate up" with digital images of my own.

Digital Da Vinci Codes: Thousands of Leonardo's Papers Go Online

Nicole Martinelli 06.21.07
Wired News

I just love Life Hacker!

I just love Life Hacker! Here's a recent post "13 book hacks for the library crowd"
http://lifehacker.com/software/hack-attack/13-book-hacks-for-the-library-crowd-269953.php

Fun, Fun!

We are all starting out on a great and fun adventure! More to come.....