Thing 13: On-line Productivity Tools

OMG...I love igoogle! I already have several tabs full of widgets. Okay, they are not all productivity oriented, I admit it. But it's just so much fun!

I have to try that countdown widget here too. I do have a personal reason for using that. But the code wouldn't work right on my personal LiveJournal account. It displayed okay but wasn't doing the countdown. I'm not sure if that's an LJ thing or not. so here goes.

Created by OnePlusYou

Okay, folks. The code generated by the widget inserts 2007 as the date in TWO places. You have to change that to make the countdown work. You get to edit code! How's that for fun? Oh wait, I guess if you just change the date to 2009, it must work, or so I've been told in other areas. Of course, that was after I edited the code for the countdown widget, but that's cool.

Been playing with google calendar and might just use that for personal stuff so I can share appointments with my husband while we're separated. He's forever forgetting what hours I work! Now he'll be able to check them for himself if he likes! And this might help us coordinate plans for the move. Less than a month to go for all practical purposes.

For library use, this would be a great thing for our library vacation calendar. We have a low-tech solution with a big calendar posted in our main workroom, but I always forget to check it after I've asked for a day off and hardly ever check it to see who's going to be gone today or this week. If it's not someone in my immediate department I don't always know schedules. This would be an interesting way to let people check any time of the day or night. I suppose work schedules could be posted this way too, in case someone forgets to check the posted paper copies for each week, at least in for our reference folks.

Also been playing with to-do lists. I actually kind of like ta-da. Remember the Milk was doing weird things. I was apparently hitting shortcut keys and the first item I typed in for one list almost immediately disappeared. Took me a while to figure out how to delete items there as I kept thinking that little checkbox was supposed to mean I'd finished the task. I like that you can have separate tasks for work and home and other thing and can move things from one list to another really easily. I have to investigate the sharing aspects of this one yet. I love lists, so hey, these are kind of fun to use. I have an online Franklin Planner that I use but that's just for home and for a while now I've been looking for something that lets me keep a work to-do list. So I'll play with both of these and I have a couple I was using on igoogle too, just to try them out.

Thing 12: Social Media Sites

Wow! I could get addicted to a couple of these sites pretty quickly. I've been going back to Mixx for a few days now before I even looked at the others. I didn't much care for Newsvine's layout. I thought the others were more straightforward. I guess I just liked the text links better than the images and little boxes all over Newsvine.

For keeping up with news, these could be interesting possibilities. And it covers so much more than just politics and such. I could see them as being big time-sinks, too.

It would be cool if a library could do this kind of site for their patrons and others who might wander into the mix, but to make it more of a local/community kind of thing. I think the teen crowd would use it a lot, but maybe they would just prefer the wider focus of the bigger sites. There are so many more people there to vote on the popular links. I guess I'm not really feeling the love in our library aside from maybe providing links to the most popular social media sites on our Internet Resources page and seeing how many people that attracts. For personal use, I guess I would have to experiment more with the other three I liked and then choose one. Going to more than one gives more exposure to things, but I just don't have the time!