Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Thing #26

Join the Ning

I joined the Ning and the RCL group in Round 1. It's a place to post commments and stuff so that you can say you completed a Thing -- but it doesn't seem to be a place where people are staying. If I see one more cute widget, I'll scream!

Monday, March 2, 2009

Thing #25

The Blogger's Toolkit

Here are the four gadgets I tried:

1) Typealizer
This is supposed to determine your Myers-Briggs type based on your blog. You don't get any information about how it works (magic?), and there are disclaimers about how you might have one type on one blog and another type on another blog, depending on what you're blogging about. So they've pretty much covered all their bases. On my blog they got two out of four letters right -- so pretty much the same odds as flipping a coin.
2) Blog readability test
I couldn't get this to work with my blog's url. I just wanted to find out if I was smarter than a fifth grader.
3) Spoken Text
This converts a passage of text into a spoken word recording. You get a choice of voices -- American, British, French, Spanish. All male voices, though. It took a looong time to translate a short passage, and the recording only lasts for one day unless you upgrade your account. Looks like you can pay to get more voices and to hang onto your recording.
4) Google Gadgets
The only think I actually added to my blog was a gadget for the top box office hits of the week. It comes with ads (Do You Like Beyonce?), so I'm not sure I want to keep it.

A lot of the gadgets/widgets were for helping readers link to other places and interact with you, which is great, if the purpose of your blog is to get some important information off your chest. Since my blog is more of a personal, keeping-track-of-homework blog, I decided not to try out the interactive stuff. I did enjoy the videos, though.

Thursday, February 26, 2009

Thing #24

Refresh Your Blog

My blog is looking very refreshed with a new text color and a sparkly Yahoo! avatar. Took a while to get the avatar on there, as the instructions from "23 Things" are already out of date.

The refreshed blog has been duly registered. I find myself hoping that no one will look at it, as it is truly dull -- even with the undersea ballerina. Onward and upward...