#11 A Thing About LibraryThing

LibraryThing is a useful tool for cataloging your collection of books, or books you have read. I didn't know how many of my books would be online, but I found a good collection. My "library" consists more of design and web design books rather than the traditional fiction and non-fiction books.

One of my favorite (offline) programs for my Mac is Delicious Library. It allows you to catalog your books, CDs and DVDs on your personal (Mac) computer. One feature that I love is that you can 'scan' your item by the barcode on the back with your built-in iSight camera and it will pull all the information about the book, CD or DVD from Amazon.com online. It also interfaces with the built-in Address Book program, so you can log who has what and when they borrowed it from you.

Hollywood Sign Generator

hollywood_sign
Originally uploaded by bradmac

Hollywood Sign Generator

#10 Play Around With Image Generators

Image generators can be found online in the thousands. A Google search turns up over 416,000 in some shape or form.

One fun one I found was the Hollywood Sign generator at GlassGiant.com.

#9 Finding Feeds

I have used Technorati in the past and have always liked the way the feeds are presented on Technorati. They present the feeds on their site similar to Amazon does. When you click on a 'Technology' feed, you also get similar posts related to the field of Technology.

#8 Make life "really simple" with RSS & a newsreader

I set up my Bloglines account, you can see my feed here LibraryBrad. RSS is a great if you have a lot of information you would like to digest in a short amount of time Nice feature if you have 20 blogs you read on a regular basis and want to find out who has updated and read only the newest posts.

#7 Blog about Technology

One technology application I have enjoyed using recently is a product or application called CrazyEgg. It allows you to place a small script on a page of a website to analyze how visitors are using your website and where they are clicking by creating a 'heatmap' of clicks. The more red/yellow the spot, the more people are clicking on that spot or link. The blue/green spots....less clicks.

Very useful when creating a new website or trying out a new layout. It also allows you to analyze what the people or users want, rather than what you 'think' they want.

#6 More Flickr Fun

I found a few of the mashup programs and the Librarian Trading Card Generator, but I think the one I enjoyed the most was the flickr retrievr.

It allows you to draw or sketch a rather crude object or idea of an object, and it will pull up photos based on the shape, color or size of your sketch...neato!