It's two in one this time, as I've had to catch up with the programme.
Thing 9 was creating our own search engine using Rollyo. You'll notice that I've added my Rollyo search engine to the right. From here, you can search this blog, a selection of websites on Ancient Egypt, or the web. Feel free to try it out!
Thing 10 is tagging and folksonomies, specifically looking at delicious. I've used delicious in the past but didn't really take to it. In the spirit of 23 Things, I've had another look at my account. I saved some bookmarks this time last year, when looking at other University library blogs for inspiration when starting our subject blogs at Westminster. However, most of the bookmarked blogs hadn't been updated for ages, so I've deleted them. I saved some new bookmarks on Egyptology and (my other obsession) Matt Damon. You can see all my bookmarks at on my delicious page If you haven't seen the youtube clip of Matt slating Sarah Palin, I strongly suggest you do. Just one reason why he's such an amazing guy!
Photo by Emma Woods, all rights reserved.
As part of a team event yesterday for the Academic Liaison Librarians and IT trainers, I ran a session on blogs with some other colleagues. At the end of the session, we presented some awards for our subject blogs
, which we started about a year ago. The first award was for accessibility. I used a helpful post from the American Foundation for the Blind to guide people as to what to look for. One of the criteria was alt tags and I'm afraid I wrongly misled people that these couldn't be used with Blogger - sorry!
The image above was one copied from my Flickr account and therefore already contained an alt tag from the title I'd given it. However, you can easily add or change an alt tag using the Edit HTML tab. You need to add alt="your alt tag name" into the image code. For example, for the picture above, the code is alt="Abu Simbel". Try inserting just before the border/class/height code. Hope this works!
On an unrelated point, I chose the image above not because of recent events in Egypt but because we were learning about Ramesses II in my Egyptology class last night. Abu Simbel is undoubtedly the most impressive of his temples. I am adding a cruise on Lake Nasser to my list of dream trips so I can visit again!
In the eighteen months when I lived in my own flat and had space for two bookcases, I went into librarian overdrive and ordered my books not just in alphabetical order but also by type (fiction, travel, etc). Now I have barely space for one bookcase and most of my books are stored in boxes under the bed, so there is no order whatsoever! Maybe this is a good sign, as it shows I have better things to do with my time.
Anyway, for thing number 8 of Westminster's 23 Things Programme, we have been asked to create a personal library of our books using LibraryThing. As you may have noticed from my LibraryThing gadget on this blog, I have already done this. I mainly use it to record how many books I'm reading, as well as what type. As you can see, I've been reading far too many vampire romance novels recently! Due to my lack of book space, I tend to borrow books from my local library (Balham) or from friends, rather than buy them. Handily, LibraryThing allows you to tag books as read but unowned.
In the spirit of doing something new as part of 23 Things, I've finally got round to rating the books I've read. I still can't be bothered to write reviews of them though!
