Bookmarking Sites

After playing around with Delicious for a couple of days, I've come to the conclusion that I'm not a big fan. I find the site itself quite unattractive, and the constant ads very annoying. The name itself is a bit of a turn-off as well! I found a list, by social media examiner, which has good examples of how to use Delicious to its best capabilities. Number three, company sharing, seems to be a great way to use Delicious, but at the moment it's not something that I need because I'm not working in a company that needs to do that. I do like being able to see other people's lists, however. Here's a good one that belongs to a librarian at RMIT: https://delicious.com/infomanlibrarian. There are lots of interesting websites bookmarked here.

 There are lots of other bookmarking sites around, I like the google one for it's simplicity, and diigo seems very good as well. There's a video that diigo made to show how it can be used, I've embedded it here:



I like the highlighting and sticky note features of this site, I think that it would be very helpful for study.

A problem that has come up lately for me has been the sheer amount of passwords I've had to create for all of these sites that I'm joining. I might have to get a password manager just to keep track of them all! And what should my passwords be? At the moment, I'm making them randomly, choosing numbers and letters in no particular order, but is there a better way? John Oliver had an interview with Edward Snowden about passwords: margaretthatcheris100%sexy is a great one!

Google mapping

This map contains directions to the house that I grew up in, in the lovely town of Castlemaine. I've included directions by car, as well as a link to the Victorian Heritage database where there is a description of the house. It's a reasonably important place; built right around the beginning of the Gold Rush in Victoria, it was the old police station in Castlemaine as well as the last place that Robert O'Hara Bourke lived before he went off on his expedition (which didn't turn out well at all). The woman that my mum sold the place to painted the house blue, so if you go to the street view, it looks totally different today.

Originally I tried to embed the map using the google+ share button on the left hand side of the map, but I kept on coming up with a ginormous map when I tried posting it. So then I used the button on the bottom right of the page, which gave you sizing options, but that wouldn't keep the directions on the map. In the end, I used the first URL again and changed the sizing myself in the code, and I think that it has turned out fairly well!

This week I have also been working through the activities on Codeacademy, which I have actually really enjoyed! I think that a big help is being able to see the updates that you are making to the code in real time, so you don't have to refresh the page or submit your work to see where the mistakes are. Also, the badges that you are awarded as you progress really help, it gives you something to work towards and also break up the sections a bit more. I've posted a badge onto my twitter page, like a big proud dork.