Week 4, RSS and Newsreaders: Warning, some slight whingeing ensues

Right, Monday morning and here I am again, a part-timer with rather limited options for the fitting-in of these activities, doing my, ah, well it can hardly be called homework when one is doing it at work, so, unh, let's call it the weekly task.

(A kind and caring colleague suggested that I could always blog from home, ah yes, well, I could, but then if I had the time to blog from home I'd still be using the one at LJ Land and while we're on the subject see entry 1, regarding DIAL-UP. I've just lost another hour to the reading and fiddling here when I should have been shelving and here at work we're on microwave technology. I'm thinking if I tried to follow these tasks at home it would take many, many hours and far too much coffee for the health of my probably already caffeine-pickled kidneys.)

I have an account established at Bloglines, I had a little difficulty finding my URL there so as an alternative I did try and insert a Bloglines button in to Blogger but it turns out that this is not permitted in any of the various places I attempted to place it.

I did then realise that the instructions are completely wrong and would have you all looking for a tab at the top of the page when in fact the link is in the list at the side.

At the bottom.

::sigh::

Ergo, here 'tis: http://www.bloglines.com/public/xaelle

To end on a positive note, I have achieved the linkage of two of my favourite blogs as an RSS feed using two different techniques of linkage, but am out of time to chase up the Newsreader tasks.

Week 3 Flickr'in around...

Okay, this is going to be light on content as it's taken me an hour to read this weeks tasks (following all the links, at which point I am going to say that I cannot believe there are blogs and communities set up to explain to people that tagging is netspeak for 'labelling you pictures with key words so that you may find them again with ease at a later date'. Fool that I am I would have thought a paragraph or two in the FAQs section could have probably covered this to most people's satisfaction. I followed a little of the discussion about the decision to label pictures of oneself as 'me' and left because it was making my eyeballs bleed) listen to the podcast, open an account at Flickr, upload my images and insert it into this blog entry.

Actually it seemed fairly painless to me and if anything it took me longer to get a handle on uploading to Flickr because I was expecting it to be far more complicated and read far more of the site instructions than was necessary for a result.

This koala, in all her carrying-the-baby cuteness, lumbered slowly through our backyard last summer and as koalas are not noted for their keen eyesight we were able to get close enough to immortalise the moment.

Country living! It's moments like these that make living with a septic tank bearable.

#4 Register your blog

Hmmn, two things: firstly why is this #4 when we're only in week 2? And secondly, following on in the theme of comparing LJ with Blogger, it's easier to access your account in LiveJournal.

Week 2 of Learning 2.0 aka: The joys of blogging

I kept a blog for quite a few years and thoroughly enjoyed it, the writing, the contacts with folks from far away, the insights into other people's lives, their photos, their thoughts.

My blog still exists but cannot be accessed from work because Brimbank Libraries are protected by MailMarshall and MailMarshall does not approve of LiveJournal. Possibly something to do with all that fanfic which wanders off into the land of soft porn at times methinks. Also I suspect the title of the LJ blog Vintage Sex is, on its lonesome, enough to render LJ Land forever inappropriate viewing for a public library and certainly a den of iniquity from the perspective of employees expanding their understanding of new technologies on the company clock.

So I thought it might be interesting to start the process again over here @ blogspot. By comparison this is a much more user friendly interface. LJ involves downloading a client (semagic) and installing it. I did this years ago and can remember that the downloading was tedious because it is done via mirror sites and once a geographically challenged person - such as myself - managed to locate the right site and language then start the download (we're on dial up, us country folks from the back blocks of rural Victoria: think no street lights, no footpaths and yes, the dreaded septic tank and you'll have the picture) wander off have a cup of coffee, wander back and watch the bar slowly march across the 'time remaining' box, collect the mail (five minute walk to the mailbox and five back), have another coffee and oh, 'tis done. Download finished! What next? Install the programme, easy enough if you can find it. In my computer innocence it hadn't occured to me to make a note of the name of the client so another trawl through the instructions at LJ was mandated. At which point I gave up and made a plunger full of coffee to last the distance.

Getting started at LJ took me two days, this has taken forty five minutes including the typing and the reading of instructions and the swapping through three machines in the hope of finding one where the headphones work.

Even allowing for the exponenetial growth rate in computer literacy that being part of an online community will bring to you, Blogger is winning on points.

So far.

(Heh.)