Success! First image loaded into a blog. How rewarding. Definitely makes the blog less text heavy and consequently less boring. I enjoyed creating the iGoogle page. It was quite user-friendly and the instructions from the Cam23 team fool-proof. Thanks guys. May have taken me a bit longer to get to grips with otherwise - time playing around trying to work out what I was doing. Adding stuff was a joy but more important for me was deleting some of the stuff the page seemed to come with. I can understand having a few things on there so that you can see what type of thing is available but the screen just seemed a bit crowded until you get in there and have a good sort and clear out. Some of the things you can add are invaluable and if you use them regularly enough I can see the advantage of having them there rather than searching using the traditional Google search engine each time. For example, I have kept the weather report and added a Dictionary, wikipedia search engine, currency converter and arabic-roman numeral converter. Some of the boxes seem to take up too much unnecessary space though and I found this particularly true of the YouTube one. This has now been duly filed in a folder on the left menu bar. Organising things around the screen was really straightforward and allowed me to customise my page with heavily used things at the very top so that I don't have to scroll which I found to be a good thing. There seem to be no restrictions on this. There is nothing that has to stay which allows more freedom than I might have expected.
With regard to RSS feeds. Well I'd seen them and used them but never for one moment expected to add one to my own page. This was easily done and the fact RSS feeds are updated without me actually having to do anything to them or having to revisit the page is fantastic. I can certainly see the attraction of these and how they might be a valuable tool for libraries, or indeed, any other institution wanting to keep its customers / clients / members up-to-date - the possibilities do seem quite endless. The advantages of spam protection and easy cancellation for the user are also attractive ones. It may be, for example, that you are only attached to an institution for a fixed period of time. Adding an RSS feed doesn't have the same feel as saying you are happy to receive endless emails from some marketing monster just because you once expressed an interest in something. Its up-to-date information of interest to you where you want it and when you want it. Having said that, I'm not sure I fancy creating an RSS feed. That part of the article by Zeki Celikbas scared me off a bit! In that respect I'd hope it was easy to maintain one once it had been established.
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