Laura and Labels

Thank goodness for Laura's timely post "Half-way point!" and its description of the Labels gadget. When I added this gadget to my blog the full horror of my amateur labelling efforts was exposed for all to see. I had been entering the labels incorrectly, not separating each label with a comma, and as a result I had long stringy labels in my list. Luckily I was able to edit each post and tidy up the labels and I now have a very respectable and tidy list on my blog. Honour is satisfied.
Now all I need to do is catch up with last week's Things ...

Timezone

Whilst trying to change my email address to the new @bodleian version I came across the timezone setting for my blog and changed it to GMT. Now my posts will have the correct time stamp. A small victory, but a sweet one.

Social bookmarking

I have to confess I heaved a sigh of relief when I saw this week's things. I've been using Delicious to save my bookmarks (aka favourites) ever since the Oxford Web 2.0 day back in spring 2008, and feel very comfortable with it. I've just added the bookmarklets (is that a real word?) to my Firefox toolbar, and will add a bookmark for my blog when I've finished this post.
I do find it very useful to have my bookmarks with me wherever I go, and I would never go back to using bookmarks/favourites linked to a PC.
Having said that, I have been fairly indiscriminate in my bookmarking, and I now have 330. Many of these I no longer use, and I should really delete some of them. I have tried to use tagging consistently, and Delicious makes this easy by suggesting tags that you have used before and other possible tags as part of the process of creating the bookmark.
Another problem with my use of Delicious is that I have a single account for work and personal bookmarks. I should really set up separate accounts and keep the two sets separate. It's too easy to be distracted by personal bookmarks (like the latest products at ModernCat) when I really should be working ...

Flickr and Picnik

Considering 7 is my lucky number, Thing 7 got off to a bad start when I could not link my Yahoo ID to my existing Flickr account. Tried two or three times, and eventually gave up and created a new Flickr account (leda_neatfossil). Uploaded some photos of the January snow in Moreton and the cats in moody black and white. Geotagged one of the snowy shots, which was great fun. Thanks to a mouse malfunction I almost located the photo in Norway - which, considering the snowy scene, was not as dumb as it sounds. Played around a bit with Picnik but could not achieve anything worth saving. May have another go tomorrow.
Here's a link to my Flickr photostream:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/leda_neatfossil/

RSS feeds and a glass of wine

I went back to Google Reader this evening, with a glass of wine near at hand, to spend some more time with RSS feeds. I have to confess this was prompted by receiving a link from friends in Washington, DC, to their photographs of the recent snow storm (http://web.me.com/dcbooboobear/Site/Snowmageddon.html). I was slightly surprised to see the now-familiar RSS icon, and clicked on it to add the feed to my Google Reader.
Once "in the zone", I added a few more feeds from the Recommended Sources. That led me to wonder who recommends these sources? I checked in the Google Reader help and discovered that it's done automatically based on various factors including the feeds you're subscribed to, information from your web history and your location (see
http://www.google.com/support/reader/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=80468 for more details). This strikes me as having something of the Big Brother about it, but I have to admit that the Recommended Sources were all on the money and I added all of them (including our own Digitalist) with the only exception of the graduate trainees' blog.
Looking forward to next week's Things!

By the way ...

Every time I go to my blog I always finish by clicking "Next Blog". It's different everytime!

Does she know her RSS from her email?

I have set up my Google Reader and have added some feeds, including some of the blogs of other 23 Things Oxford participants. I'm getting another flashback, to when I set up a Bloglines account last year (or was it 2008?) and subscribed to so many feeds I just could not keep up with them. Aren't RSS feeds just another way of feeling overwhelmed by information, like email? I gave up on the Bloglines account but did not delete it - goodness knows how many items are sitting in it now, patiently waiting for my attention...

What is the optimum manageable number of RSS feeds?

PS Apologies for the pointlessly punning title.