Thing 6 - Image Generators

Ok, here's another serious time sucker. But fun (of course). Might think about adding these to our website every once in a while. The trading cards are pretty fun too. I'll have to come up with a cool "library" game to go with them.

Thing 5 - More Flickr

...so you see what's on my mind right now.

Some neat toys, but much potential for being time suckers! Don't see a whole lot of potential for use at the library except for as fun graphics to plop on the site or blog every once in a while.

Thing 10 update

Well, the wiki is up and running and has withstood a day and a half of kids signing up. Good news: it works, and works from any computer.
Bad news: it is SLOW. Don't know if it's just pbwiki, but as I'm typing in each child's info, we have to wait 5-10 seconds for just about every field until the computer can catch up. It's just as slow from my home computer, so it's not the machine. Might just use Excel next year.

Thing 10 - Wikis

Ok, so I'm doing things a little bit out of order here, but we're getting ready for summer reading to start (Thursday) and we were talking about how to best have things set up for the rush of kids expected to arrive on the first few days. Previously, the library had used a database program to sign up all the kids. Which is fine, but it's over 10 years old, and only installed on one computer. So I thought a little, and since I've been busy redesigning the website anyway, added an online signup. You can also get your reading contracts and coloring contest pages at home, since I put them up as pdf's. Slowly, slowly, we'll get this site up and actually used. As an aside, I really like the emailmeform that Tom showed us in the last users meeting. :)

Anyway, our library director is a little farther along on the 23 things that I am, and she just finished Thing 10... And I have to admit, now that I've explored wikis a bit, it seems like a good option.

Yes, I've used wikipedia before, but never edited anything before. I also didn't realize that there were wikis out there that you could set up yourself. But I added my post to the 23 Things wiki, and then went ahead and created a wiki for our summer reading signup. Was a little concerned about privacy, but it looks like you can restrict who can see the site, so that's good. So here's what the wiki looks so far:


So we'll see how it works under fire. Might end up being useful, or we may just revert to the old database.