Great Gadgets and Wonderful Widgets continued...

Having gobbled down lunch and done my stint at Bowyer's Arms in aid of the Village Plan I can now return to my penultimate post for 23Things.

Finally I add delicious to iGoogle home page. First I make room by deleting UKeIG blog - no-one has "yammered away" since March 2009. I left their news and announcements feed as this had been updated. I went to add stuff and searched for "delicious". Some interesting gadgets for Delicious, low fat vegan cooking which looked interesting and would probably offer some healthy alternatives to my regular diet but not what is required for this exercise. Also there was Banana Rama to help two hungry monkeys get some delicious bananas. Typing in del.icio.us brought up more appropriate widgets. Interestingly, they did slightly different things, for example: "nuage delicieux" a french site for the cloud display of you delicious tags, and "oishii "showing most popular sites recently booked marked by delicious users. Glancing through the delicious gadgets and their descriptions I selected "My Delicious". The "My Delicious" abstract seemed to suggest it would do everything I want; "get a delicious hotlist right on your home page, browse bookmarks or see the latest entries from your networks, easily switch user ... ." In selecting this gadget the criteria I used were the providence of the gadget feeling that a "google gadget" was likely to work and be reliable. I checked the starred rating and number of users and reviews to aid my selection. Needless to say I was also influenced by the attractive icon. I set the parameters to "Fiona" and realised I had retrieved all the delicious sites belonging to any "Fiona". Making it more specific my delicious sites appeared happily displaying my latest entries on "cloud computing and libraries". This is very useful and will remind me to find time to read them. I really believe 23Things isn't going to come to an end with is task and the final post which follows. I add the picture above - I learnt how do this from an earlier task accomplished from way back in week one or week two!
I like the "editors picks" . It is an ideal way to promote various gadgets particularly as there are so many of them - one for everyone and everything; daily horoscopes, BBC Good Food, a "day since counter" and "Sudoku". The abstracts are clear and informative. I had already added National Rail enquiries to my iGoogle page. I wonder who the "editor" is and how often the picks are updated especially as the gadget "Vancouver 2010 Olympics Games", schedules, results, medal counts for 2010 Winter Olympics must now be out of date. It was a popular widget with 3,352 users, 21 ratings and starred at 4 1/2. This rather prompts me to note that one's iGoogle page probably should be regularly refreshed and like this blog will never be as perfect or complete as one would like. With the elections looming I was tempted by "TheyWorkFor You" gadget, the abstract of which reads "Information on MPS from TheyWorkForYou.com" It has five stars, one review and 2,334 users. I feel the number of users will increase in the coming weeks.

Sadly my last post approaches

Great Gadgets and Wonderful Widgets

I write on Good Friday thinking I really should be on vacation from all things work related. However, as I am sitting in my pajamas with the radio on it's not so arduous a task. I have to go and represent the Village Plan Steering Committee at the Good Friday Walk this afternoon, so this morning is an a good opportunity to explore the final things.

Penny suggested the article http://tinyurl.com/dkyssu. This was an excellent introduction to gadget/widget environment. It provides a brief summary of the types of gadget/widget that are available: communication gadgets, social gadgets, utility gadgets and, of course the catch all miscellaneous gadgets! As yet I have not used the communication gadgets such as Google talk, Jaxtor, meebome or Sykpe. A number of the social gadgets looked useful such as Easy Comments and MyBlogLog . I have already tried out the Google Search gadget. Of the miscellaneous gadgets, I have already added Flickr and YouTube to my iGoogle home page. The article encouraged me to consider the individual functionality of gadgets and the environments in which they could be used appropriately. Following the blogs discussions on the separation of "work-related" and "personal and entertainment" pages, I feel in reality that any iGoogle page or blog homepage is going inevitably to be a mixture of the serious functional gadget and the fun widget. The gadgets can be a great way of organising effective access to the information you need but as the article says "there are many gadgets and widgets you can add" and this suggests to me that a judicious selection is required so that your iGoogle page or blog homepage doesn't becomes like any other disorganised drawer of paper clips, elastic bands, leaky biros, and other "whatisthisfor?" widgets!
Arranging the gadgets on your iGoggle home page or blog is of course a personal choice and says much about your interests and information needs. As suggested by the team I tried moving the gadgets on my blog around but as I discovered the blog template of which I was so proud back in Week Three (how long ago that seems!) just keeps moving them back!

Adding widget to display the tumbnails from my Flickr photostream was comparatively easy. My only reservation is that I didn't seem to be able to select individual photographs but just a certain number. I tried various options to get a subset to display but to no avail! I also found the display rather static. I prefer the slideshow gadget with which I experimented back in Week Four. If only I could get rid of the girl in the bikini!

I have also added the newsreel gadget to my blog. I was impressed by the ease with which it could identify and post relevant stories from the world of astronomy. I am not sure about the colours of the posting as they seem I little out of tune with my chose theme. I think I will go back and change them. I will also need to see how regularly they are updated.

On to the penultimate post ...