Pinterest

So this week's task was to familiarise ourselves with Pinterest. I signed up for an account and started looking around. It would be very easy to spend hours looking at boards and pinning items as you drill down through layers and get lured off in other directions. I can see the appeal of the site and how it would be useful for libraries. I'm not sure how much I will be using it in my personal life, but maybe as I become more comfortable with it, it will grow on me.

Signing up for an account was no problem. I had a bit of trouble with the Pin It button though. I'm not sure whether I was expecting it to do something it doesn't, or whether it doesn't work with my browser (IE11), but I couldn't do the drag and drop or the install. When I tried right clicking on the image and selecting "Add to Favourites" that seemed to do something. I still don't have the nice little Pinterest icon though. :(

A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words

By Inkey (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

This week's 23 Things module is about using images properly. Our first challenge was to find a Creative Commons image and post it in our blog with the proper attributions. I chose this image, because it reminds me of a trip I took to Albania in 2008. This is Castle Krujë (Croo-yah), an old fort from the Middle Ages which Albanian hero Skanderbeg succesfully defended against the Ottomans on multiple occasions.

I also had fun playing around with Wordle and creating this Olympic-themed word cloud.

Although it is very easy to create images in Wordle, it's not so easy to save them if you want to create a .jpeg or some other image that you can keep. If you opt to save your creation to a public gallery, the tool will give you some HTML code that you can use to post the image to your blog, but you can't control the size. To get this image, I had to take a screenshot, open it in Adobe Photoshop, and create the .jpeg from there. In this regard, I prefer WordItOut, which allows you to save your creations easier.

Finally, I always wondered where all those funny memes come from on Facebook. Now, thanks to 23 Things, I know. The cool extra thing I tried today was creating a movie poster. This one is for my friend Rainey:

Background image by Stuart Caie from Edinburgh, Scotland (Indexed) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons