Thing #23 !

Well, it looks like I finally made it to the end of this journey. I was more than a little dubious of my success at the start of this adventure due to my relatively little experience with technology. Sure, I knew how to access various web sites and send and receive emails and I was an expert at online shopping! However, RSS feeds, social networking sites, mashups,wikis and the like were all new to me.
Getting a late start on the project was also a little daunting but I was determined to see it through and just took the "one step at a time" approach to it. Valuable help was offered by another staff member, Sue V., who helped me through the stages of "adding a gadget" to my blog. Once I had mastered this aspect of blogging there was no stopping me. Why did I find this so difficult in the first place? I guess it was just the number of steps that I needed to take in order to successfully save and add a particular gadget. It all seems so simple now!
This is the most valuable lesson that I have learned from this exercise; ask for help if you are having trouble understanding new technology; we cannot be expected to just pick this all up at the drop of a hat; especially if we were not lucky enough to be part of the generation of people that seem to be born knowing how to program a computer!
One of my favorite discoveries on this journey was the flickr web site. As you can see I had great fun using the wonderful images on this site to decorate my blog. Another surprising thing was the RSS newsfeeds that I added to my blog. It continues to amaze me that the news headlines are magically updated for me on a regular basis; I am connected to the "outside" world even though I may be working away on my blog.
One of the most surprising outcomes of blogging was the realisation that others were actually reading my blog. I had not expected to receive comments from anyone other than family or staff members. This had led me to realise that blogging is probably not for me. I prefer to actually know who it is I am communicating with rather than corresponding with an anonymous person known only by a screen name.
Over all this was a great experience for me although time consuming at some points. I now have a much greater level of confidence in my technological capabilities and feel that I am much more equipped to help my library patrons with this new aspect of our lives.