Thing 13: Productivity Tools

I've been having a good time with this one. I chose to make a customized Start page on IGoogle, and picked my themes and widgets from a truly staggering array of choices. I added the tabs "Home," "News," "Cooking," "Art," "Entertainment," and "Independent Film." Then I chose the themes (art backgrounds)to appear on each page from mermaids to Civil War photos to the "Pig of Happiness" and more. Personalizing is super fun!
Then I picked some widgets for my Home page. After careful deliberation, I ended up with an Oscar Wilde quote of the day, a feed from Librarian.net, a Book Lover's Guide, a weather widget, and again more. Searching for widgets (gadgets) is both satisfying and frustrating. There are just so many, and the search button seems to bring up existing titles only rather than just anything related to a topic. So, it's kind of a treasure hunt. I can see how you could spend hours looking for the perfect Productivity tool :) I still want to tinker.

Next, I moved on and tried to make a Countdown widget, mine was to Halloween (a holiday that I love), but the counter part would move. I plan to try again before I am done with this thing.

Most recently, I created an event list and calendar on Spongecell. I picked it from Wired's list of the web's best calendars, but it really wasn't much of a choice, because I didn't want to make a Hotmail account to use their site, I don't want to pay for Backpack, and Kiko wouldn't open for me. However, I'm happy with Spongecell and I like the list of Wentworth library events that it let me publish at the bottom of this blog. I had a harder time making a calendar of a usable size. They were either too big or too narrow, with very thin boxes and little room for event titles. Goldilocks hasn't found the one that's just right yet...

I just made a To Do list at Ta-da lists. I made a shopping list for our upcoming teen program Teens Make Gocks. You can check it out here: http://cleery.tadalist.com/lists/1020072/public

I just tried again with the Countdown widget and also made a ticker countdown to the library's upcoming Breaking Dawn release party, but neither one of them actually worked once on my blog. I think my friend Katie made one of these, so I'll need to ask her for tips.