podcasting

Our next class assignment is to create a podcast. My podcast is on the website Mint which is a financial organizer that is internet-based. My podcast is about my experience with Mint, which has basically been awesome. I have all of my accounts linked to it, such as my student loans, my mortgage, as well as my credit cards & bank account. That way I can see the whole picture of my finances and where all the money is going, so I can see where I need to make changes and where my weak points are.

I had never used any kind of budgeting system before, so Mint has really helped me to keep track of things & feel less worried about money & more in control. I recommend it to anyone.

If you're interested in listening to my whole podcast, the link to it is here.

better, greener printing

I have a pet peeve, and that is when you try to print something from the web or your email, and it uses twice as much paper as it needs to. The worst is when it prints everything you wanted on the first sheet and the second sheet is just the copyright date or something, which wastes the whole sheet of paper! I try to be sure to ask it to print preview before I actually print, to make sure there is nothing funky going on, and then tell it to print at 90% scale if it will save that extra piece of paper. But sometimes I forget and it makes me so mad because it just takes a few extra seconds, and if everyone could eliminate their extra "oops" prints it would save probably thousands of trees. Or, a lot anyway.

So, I was happy when I found out about "Print what you Like." It's a bookmarklet that lets you print ONLY the important part of the page. A bookmarklet is basically just a magic link that goes on your bookmarks toolbar. It looks like this on my Firefox:

Go to Print What You Like to get yours. Once it's installed, you just click it before you print, select the text you want, and there you go. I especially love it for printing out recipes from sites like allrecipes.com with no ads!

P.S. Today there's a Groupon for gourmet chocolate! Did I buy one? Um, yes.

multimedia & blogging paper

This week's assignment was to write a paper about using multimedia in blogs & then to also summarize the paper on our blogs. So that is what this post will be.

For my paper, I wanted to narrow down the topic to something manageable in 5 pages, so I decided to focus on a topic I already know something about, which is library blogs. Many libraries have blogs, Twitter feeds, and Facebook accounts as a way to reach out to their communities and inform people of events happening in & around the library. I decided to look at some libraries' blogs to see how they were doing at incorporating multimedia.

The two I liked the best were 24 Frames a Second (the New York Public Library's film blog) and the blog of Ohio University. They both did a good job of adding photos and incorporating different techniques to make the blogs readable and more importantly fun & interesting to read.

Another blog which seemed to be a pretty well-done example of a blog with little to no multimedia is the blog of Yale University Library. I decided that there are lots of different types of blogs that can be successful; some will be very media heavy and some won't, it just depends on what kind of look and feel the institution is going for.

If anyone is interested in the other blogs I used in my paper, you can check out my Delicious links.