# 11 QLSherwood LibraryThing

LibraryThing is a wonderful tool and friend for librarians/book lovers, and anyone who needs books constantly at hand. Over there you can catalog and build up your own library by subjects, interest, names of places, indexed by tags; simply you can organize books in whatever way you can thing of. You can add up to 75 tags to any one book, that means each book can have 75 combinations to appear as searching results. In your website or blogsite you can set up a search engine to get books from your "collection" or from the Group that you have joined in the LibraryThing.

While it is rich in bibliographic information, the short end of the LibraryThing is that content description is not guaranteed, some short, some long, some none. You can always add your own review on them, though. Sherwood is a member of the Librarians who LibraryThing group; my collection address is Random Books collection on NYC, art, music and other subjects, or try a search word at the search widget above

#10 Online Image Generators

My favorite image generator is Adobe Photoshop. Yesterday I added the words "Sherwood Living Library" and "The library grows forever" to my blog header bar picture (using its layer-style functions). Photoshop generates varieties of images easily and the images can be made more personalized. The picture for this post "No Title" was one of my "postmodern" works done with Photoshop.
The QL L2.0 introduced me to know the online image generators, for Things #10. These online graphic programs all carry a lot of templates that are really handy to use. without downloading or installing any graphic software you can make pictures for website postings easily. One of them that I tried produces blog header pictures, the headerbar.com. It saves so much time compared with Photoshop. Within minutes you can finish a header that is pretty and looks professional, too.
Here above is the blog title bar I created by adding words "SHERWOOD LIVING LIBRARY" and "THE LIBRARY GROWS FOREVER" on the template image "Sunrise on the Sea". Online image generators are a great help for bloggers.

#7 Trading card Time-God

# 12 Tech Weekend 2: Had a Try at Rollyo.com

Rollyo.com is innovative and interesting. I tried it and created my own rollyo search by filling out a few info lines and keying in no more than 25 websites that you wish to search, but the giant search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, Ask, etc. should not be included. As a matter of fact Rollyo builds a search engine of your own subject interest. The result will be exact and accurate or nothing at all. There will be no more unrelated hundrends such as those produced by those huge search engines. Your own rollyo search title, for instance Sherwood as I used for the trial, will show up among the search subject area on your frontpage. Due to the cookie function, whenever I open the Rollyo, my search engine title "Sherwood" is always there, but it has to be in the same browser. For professionals and serious shoppers this feature is very good. They can increase their productivity by building up very complete rollyo search engines of their own interests gradually day by day. After months or years, they will be able to get everything in their subject fields just by one click away.

#8,9 Tech Weekend: RSS Account, Newsfeed, Newsreaders, Youtube Video.....

What did I do for the past week? I do not have time to work on my QL L2.0 assignments during working days; but by the one or two hours in the evening, plus non-working Saturdays and Sundays, still a lot can be done. First I added copyright marks on all my pictures. These pictures were taken in Manhattan, Queens, or at home; and they were edited/twisted by Adobe Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop is easy to use; like a hobby game, one can just play with it to create a variety of color and shape out of one photo. The software is expensive indeed, but recently I found a website that sells it at very low price legally by allowing buyers to down load it from the website only without instruction books, nor help support.Then I added video clips on Al Gore, the Vice President (the topic may change from time to time) from Youtube.com by following the Dashboard instructions, and a RSS newsreader from cnn.com.

Thanks to the QL L2.0 program I came to know what is newsfeed, RSS account and how to create one of my own. They have been in the web world for some years, but I did not pay attention to them because there was no motivation to learn. (See the importance of motivations?) They looked strange and formidable at first; but by following the rss links listed on my del.icio.us of the QL L2.0 by our QL L2.0 Team, it became easy. But it still took me several hours to get the right codes matching the right figs. Shortly after my newsfeed account is set up, one of the posts in my blog, "Flickr.com, the nice things", appeared on the "Goodle Reader" of my iGoogle homepage. It's a happy surprise to see it over there. Later of the day my newly setup newsfeeds for "Add to Google", "+ My Yahook", and "+ Facebook" also appeared in the iGoogle reader. At this moment there are altogether 13 items in the Google reader, the first one is a link to my blog "Living Library", all the rest are from "Green Life", that is another blogger's page in Spanish. "Living Library" also appeared on My Yahoo!, but with the words "No items in the past 3 days." Right now there are three newsreaders on my blog, Besides CNN I later added RSS newsreaders from the White House and the Library of Congress. It is useful indeed; I do not have to go to cnn.com for its headlines, I can read them right here on my blog page. I have set up my Bloglines newsreader account, and while at my home computer by clicking the Bloglines icon below I can read all the news on the "Bloglines | My Feeds" page. At other computers I need to login to read the subscribed news.

#5, 6 Flickr.com: the Nice Things

I've been using flickr.com for a while to see my grand children's photos. I also uploaded photos taken in QL colleagues' retiremen parties. what it attracted me for at first is that it allows users not only to view, but to save images onto your local drive (some big company's photo websites only allows to view and order prints!). It is so convenient to share photos with families and friends. After uploading them, you only need to send the flickr address of your pictures for them to enjoy.

Now I find that on flickr.com pictures can be organized in sets by different titles; you can also join a discussion group for common interests and post your ideas; or create your own group. In the "Explore" section, you can see posted photos/pictures by dates/weeks/years; as well as editor-recommended ones. The one I happen to see today is quite interesting; it is an interactive map of Europe scattered with red dots. When you click the dots, a pop-up small window will show scenery pictures of that city/place. It's cool and enjoyable, isn't it.
Another small but useful thing is that if you forgot the dates and time of an event, you can find them by going to "Batch Organize", then click "Edit photo"; it will tell you the time taken and when it was uploaded to flickr.com. It's nice, indeed.

Everything is an Experiment.

The Human being is still very young, everything is an experiment for something still better......

#13 Del.icio.us, Tagging You Favorites

9/30, Sunday, I tried del.icio.us, the favorite websites collector- keeper-organizer. It is easier to add websites after you install the del.icio.us posting and viewing buttons on your computer. Whenever you find an interesting website, by just one click at the posting button, it will go to your del.icio.us collection. Tags are suggested by the site. The tagging system work like an indexing. The websites are automatically grouped together by tags.The easiness of creating self-maintained tag index is appealing to me. Here is the link to my del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us/sherwood59 .