Refreshing you and your blog

It's amazing how much blogger has changed in a year.  There are some rather nifty new widgets...er...gadgets which have made it onto my blog and I find I like the minimalist style as long as I can find a good image to spice it up.  So here are the answers to the prompts given in the course:

1. How much have you blogged since you finished the original course?

I blog every week (almost) sometime more often...just not here.  Actually, here.  It's all nonsense stuff, but I'm hoping to get into blogging for the library in a few months.  I think once we get into the swing management will be impressed with what we can do.


2. What do you like about blogging?

I use it as a open letter to friends.  Thoughts and issues that I've found compelling enough to put word to screen about.  Sometimes it's just life's funny stories and they're the posts I like the best.  If others read it and...dare I say comment...all the better.  I've had a few spammers but the site software usually culls those out for me to review and on the whole my blogging career has been very positive.  I average 40 hits a day and am always surprise at what people find interesting. 

3. Have you found other blogs to read?

YES! And thanks to RSS feeds into my iGoogle page I keep up to date on all the gem of blogs I've discovered in my wanderings.  I'm a regular reader of more than a dozen different blog and the Google Reader allows me to keep them all under control.  I think it could be very hard to keep up with everthing you're interest in without being about to centralise it somehow.

4. Do you comment on others' blogs?

I do.  Not to everything I read.  I won't flame, but try to find a contructive comment that I believe in and want to stand behind.  I know how cool it is to get a thoughtful comment and so when I comment I like to make it worthwhile.

 I now have two blog (besides this one) and as I said above am looking forward to contributing to a work blog for children and youth service.  I can show with detailed statistics that it is a great way to get in touch with people.  My blog site will show how people have found my blog, what they search to find my post and who links to my posts.  Isn't that important information for any organisation?

Blogging does not require your organisation to have powerful computers, you don't need to host your blog on your own servers.  It's free, simple and with with some sites you gain access to amazing stats that can only justify the staff time, which is minimial.  To keep a blog running it needs a post a week, I think we can all achieve that no matter how small the library.

Library learning 2.1: here we go again!

This was such a great course last year that when I saw it was on again I jumped on this old blog and revamped the look.

Minimalist I know, but it does mean I have twice as much room for commenting on all the new apps that have found there way onto the Internet.

I do like how much you can now edit to suit your own tastes including the look of your Nav bar...like, only you'll be looking at it, but there's an option to change it to suit your current layout.

I didn't try one of the after market templates as I didn't think I could do that on the work machines, but I can see that having the ability to use templates made elsewhere, out choice of looks explodes into almost infinite possiblities.  Surely there would be one to suit any organisation's corporate image.

So Library learning 2.1...here we go!