Thing 23

The finish line, at last! I don't think I'm alone in my disappointment in not completing in time, but sometimes real life takes over. The deadline was in Easter week, for the whole of which my computer was switched off. I have a young child and had two birthdays, my husband's doctoral graduation, and a house full of guests to contend with. Any other time and I'd have made it, but face to face is still more important than facebook, and Easter is family time.

I've found the programme very useful, to the extent that I've changed the way I do things. I've revisited old friends - welcome back Paint and iGoogle - and am using them on a regular basis. I've been introduced to the mighty Picnik which is a serviceable alternative to Photoshop. I'll have another look at podcasts and ThinkFree Office and use them in the future; I think my mum would find the latter useful since her Office suite is always playing up.

I'm reconsidering some of the things that I've used before and found tiresome; Google Reader and Delicious are so boring it depresses me to go to their pages, but I could feed them into something more useful and attractive using iGoogle widgets.

I'm not sure I've any use for a work-only twitter or Flickr account, or LinkedIn. Flickr is a particular problem because of the conflict with my existing Yahoo ID. Delicious, for some reason, lets you log in with a Yahoo ID but doesn't appear to affect other Yahoo applications. I didn't want to use existing ID for 23 things because it's so public, insisting that you share and publish. Now I find that I have more personas than I can cope with!

My iGoogle sticky note now reads "loose ends - think about what ID you want to use and what for". You might call it thing 24.

Thing 22

I went for the widget with the highest number of users even though it was unrated, and it seems to work well. Actually it's nicer than the delicious page itself because it includes all the little coloured icons that aren't displayed there.Weirdly, that makes me want to use it, indeed I did use it to find this page again, so perhaps the reason I dislike delicious so much is simply because it's so dull. The tag cloud's prettier too, it has lots of colours and does the big/small thing properly even though I only have a tiny number of bookmarks. I like it for that, it's like it's making a real effort!

Thing 21

My word, what a palaver! I couldn't work out what the widget wanted when it asked for a username; usually that's the format that you login with, so I was trying kathryns23things and the associated yahoo login for ages before I worked out that it needed Kathryn's 23 Things with capitalisation, punctuation and spaces to work. I managed to get both my and my husband's personal accounts to load easily, because both are old and have simple lower case usernames that match their headers, so I knew the widget wasn't broken. Anyway, it works now, and all five library windows are displayed for your enjoyment.

Thing 20

ThinkFree Office looks really great compared to Google docs, a lot more sophisticated, and better still, appears to operate as a pdf writer. It's an excellent choice for basic home use. It uploads documents easily, and while it won't edit pdf documents, it will allow you to select text, copy and paste. It is a little slow to set up, but I think it's a better option than cheap desktop software (MS Works for example) for those without MS Office, which is extremely expensive.

Thing 19

I used Google docs to make an Easter card for Penny containing pictures of 23 eggs. I shared it with her, but oddly she could see the words but not the images. We couldn't work out why. The web link works fine though.

Thing 18

Wikipedia's like Google, in that it's the dirty secret of all librarians. Like everyone else it's the first place we look, when we think no-one's looking. Hopefully we use it as a starting point, and check our references. My favourite story is that of the hapless Daily Mirror football reporter who came unstuck when he looked up AC Omonia. Nature found that Wikipedia and Britannica were of similar value in terms of the accuracy of science articles, which caused an almighty row.

What do I think? Well it's a reasonable place to find out the first thing about something you know nothing about, and fine for things that don't really matter; minor mysteries that were discussed in the tea room, for example. Having found peer reviewed journal articles and published textbooks with inaccurate citations, I would always check the original source before I cited it myself, and I'd never cite Wikipedia, people would laugh at me. Interesting that, isn't it? They wouldn't laugh if I cited Britannica.

Thing 17

I've been looking at wikis this week, wondering whether we can use Weblearn to store, comment on and edit documents for our web team. As part of thing 17 I clicked on the socialouls link and typed in my usual username and password on the offchance that I already had an account. Turns out I do. Turns out the web team already has a wiki there too. Might have to give that a closer look!

In order to prove I'd edited something, I searched for errors at socialouls. I guess everyone else got there first... I formatted some text that was in the wrong font on the blogs page and tried to separate two links that were joined by underlining. I failed in the latter, several times, for which the history gives me several lines of credit! Removing the link and putting it back in again would probably fix it, but it seemed unnecessary and tiresome.