To blog or not to blog #blogjune

That does appear indeed to be the question for me. I didn't do #blogjune last year as I was  overseas for the start of it but I had done it previously for what seems like forever.  And I still do #blog12daysxmas, though this year I was shocked by the minimal participation.  I like doing #blog12daysxmas as twelve days seems more manageable than 30, and also because it is a good opportunity to review one's digital presence over the preceding year.

And indeed I did review my blogging as part of the 2015/2016 #blog12daysxmas and concluded that I wasn't doing all that much.  You can read about the 2015 experience here and I won't repeat my reflections on it here. And the interesting thing for me with that post was the aftermath. I decided not to set any blogging targets for 2016: and then I did a flurry of blogging on my Librarian and the Kitchen site. Maybe all this proves is that not having targets provides freedom, as someone suggested to me earlier in the year.

And will I do #blogjune? Well, it is a good question.  I have a number of things I want to blog about and so maybe this is the opportunity? At any rate, I have left myself open to the opportunity by blogging today.  Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

Reflecting on #anz23mthings #blog12daysxmas Day 12

So on this Day 12 of #blog12daysxmas for 2015/2016, I want to spend some time reflecting on my inability to complete #anz23mthings and reflect on reasons why this might have happened.  I started the project on May 12 2013, did the first four things, wilted a bit, and then started up again during the 2013/2014 #blog12daysxmas when I completed things 5 to 14. Then I stalled completely.

In my wrapup for that, I vowed and declared that I was on a roll, more than halfway through, and was determined to finish anz23mthings that month. So what are the reasons for such a chequered history in doing this excellent program? I think that there are two key factors and some contributing ones.

Firstly, I had done the 23 things and continued with 23.1.  This was life-changing for me and I commenced a life filled with fascination for possibilities.  This only increased once I started using mobile devices more. The end result is that for some of the Things I found that I was reading about things I had been using for years, on desktop and mobile, and often when they were startups or in beta. I had tried and discarded many more Things. In the 14 Things that I completed there were certainly new apps and slants on things that I learnt about - some were great and others disappointing, but there were a lot where I used the tools regularly. This did mean that for me the course was largely reflective rather than explorative and exciting.  I like reflection but I also like exploration and excitement and maybe it turned out that there was not the right balance for me.


Secondly, seven months or so before I started the course I had retired. The anz23things is, of course, framed in the context of libraries. Today I reviewed the 18 posts I completed and could see that from my very first post on Thing 1 Twitter (My Twitter Dilemma) this difficulty of trying to reframe my usage of the various Things (including ones like Twitter and Facebook) that I had used since 2007/8 was evident. I had used all these Things in the context of my professional life and I couldn't work out how they were going to fit with my retirement occupations. How could they work with local history, with travel, with breast cancer advocacy, with language learning, with cooking? This thread emerges throughout the posts.

And the subsidiary reasons? I blamed #blogjune for my first fallout.  But I don't really know why I didn't just get on with it for my #blogjune posts.  Anyway I didn't.  And then I headed off to the US for another trip in the second half of 2013. As I said above, I started off again in December 2013/January 2014. Then in 2014 travel intervened again with trips to Greece/Wales/France/England in the first half of the year and to the US and Canada in the second half of the year.  And then it was out of sight, out of mind, and, of course, the Greek factor started to take effect. In fact, already in the Things that I completed you can see evidence of the Greek factor starting to intrude. I had started 23mthings just after my return from Greece after my first trip back after retirement.

 

So, will I ever complete the other nine Things?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  I reviewed them this evening. Again, most of them are things I have used for ages and either still use or no longer find need for in my current circumstances and interests. Maybe I should just power through them and document what happens. Afterall, I found it very interesting to read about my dilemmas in relation to the first 14.

I think, however, for me the really interesting thing is my reflections on what life there is for 23 Things or 23mthings outside of the library professional environment - for me. To explore that further is something that fascinates me.  But maybe I need to finish the project to get on top of that?

 

#blog12daysxmas Day 11 My Flickr obsession

Well, I am not really sure whether it would technically be defined as an obsession but Flickr is something I certainly peruse and interact with at least once a day. I first learned about Flickr and joined up many years ago when I did 23 Things.  So I guess I have Helene Blowers to blame for my obsession but really I want to offer thanks again as 23 Things was a life-changing thing for me. And what's a little obsession or two or three or 23?

I am an inveterate snapper, rather than a careful photographer, and all those snaps land on Flickr, get edited and stay there if I think they are any good.  Or, I will admit, sometimes if they are not particularly good but I really want the photo as a memory.  Since I have had an iphone 5, my camera has been gathering dust and I mostly take my photos on the phone. Often I take them through the Instagram app and share them onto Flickr and I have another community there, of course.

But the Flickr community is an important one to me.  We had an inaugural Flickrup dinner at the Fox in Melbourne last year when we gathered together local participants in the 2014PAD and cf14 groups.  It was great fun.  And when I was in England and Wales last year I had two smaller Flickrups in London and Cardiff with people I have met through these same groups.  It is always so good to meet these online friends IRL and talk and talk.

During #blog12daysxmas last year, Flickr certainly featured in the challenges I set myself for 2014. So did I meet these challenges? I did!  I completed my 365 photos for PAD2014 and Project365, and I completed the Challenge Friday for all weeks of 2014 for myself and with the assistance of some other members for the Collingwood Historical Society. In 2014, I administered the 2014PAD group, the Victorian Hotels group and the Victorian Public Library Buildings groups and I contributed to quite a few other groups.  Notable among these was the Trove group which provides a fabulous way for Australians to get their photos onto Trove. During 2014 I also set up another group jointly with the Collingwood Historical Society, the Abbotsford, Clifton Hill and Collingwood group for photos taken in the area covered by the former municipality of Collingwood.  If you take any photos there, please add them to the group. It is so important that we document today which is tomorrow's history.  And there is lots to document in Collingwood today.

So what's my Flickr challenge for 2015? It's much of the same really.  I continue with Challenge Friday (cf15) for both me and the Collingwood Historical Society. I am doing my PAD for 2015, both for 2015PAD and Project365.  Thanks to my UK co-admin Julia, we managed to get the 2015PAD group up while I was suffering from lack of Telstra connectivity. I continue to administer my hotels, Victorian public library buildings and the "Collingwood" group.  And I will organize another Melbourne Flickrup soon!

Everyone is welcome to join any of these groups!  So why don't you come on over to Flickr and check them out?

#blog12daysxmas Post 13 Epiphany

 

I don't usually do an Epiphany post to end #blog12daysxmas but this year I seem not really to have been very reflective about my 2013 challenges, nor to have documented the ones I have set myself for 2014.  So here goes!

Most years I do set myself some challenges which have arisen from my doing the original 23 things all those year ago in 2008. Some of them are challenges that I have done for years, and others are one offs. Read on to hear about my successes and failures in 2013, my learnings and my aims for 2014.

 Blogging
In 2013 I successfully completed #blog12daysxmas in January 2013, both for myself and for the Collingwood Historical Society. I finished it a couple of days late.  In June, I embarked less than satisfactorily in #blogjune for both myself and for the Collingwood Historical Society. That meant I was committing to doing 60 blogposts in June.  I must have been mad!  I have blogged about my madness here. In the end I managed to do 30 blogposts for the Collingwood Historical Society and 22 for myself.  So all up it wasn't too bad.

I maintain to a greater or lesser degree three blogs for myself and one for the Collingwood Historical Society.  The number of posts I did for each in 2013 are as follows:

Collingwood Historical Society 51 posts

Hecuba's Story 40 posts

Hecuba Reads 1 post

The Librarian & the Kitchen 4 posts

I was fairly pleased with the Collingwood Historical Society blog and amazed that with Hecuba's story I actually completed more blogposts than I had since 2009!  However, I am not so pleased with the others. In particular, more people actually read the Librarian and the Kitchen blog than anything else I write and people actually ask me when I am going to post something again.  I do create recipes, note them down on scraps of paper, take photos and them forget to write them up.I could definitely do better.

So, for 2014 what shall I do?  I have already completed #blog12daysxmas though only for myself. And as I am going to be away for part of June, I am not sure that #blogjune is going to be for me this year.  I regret that as I have been doing it ever since it started but sometimes things have to change.  I guess I will assess that as the time. And for the blogs, I am going to set myself some targets and see how I go.

Collingwood Historical Society 52 posts

Hecuba's Story 12 posts

Hecuba Reads 4 posts

The Librarian & the Kitchen 12 posts

#anz23mobilethings

I  started doing #anz23mobilethings enthusiastically when the program first started in May 2013.  I completed the first four things and then stopped.  My stopping seemed to relate to being overwhelmed with my over commitment to #blogjune but then I never went back to it.  However, I was determined to return to it during #blog12daysxmas, and I have now completed Thing 11.  I'm halfway there as Jan Holmquist supportively told me yesterday. I have committed to finish this in January 2014.  I am on a roll with it and enjoying doing it, so I believe I shall succeed.



Goodreads

In 2013 I made a modest commitment to reading 52 books in the year, i.e. an average of one a week.  I more than succeeded in this by reading or rereading more than 106 books. I document almost everything I read on Goodreads and will continue to do so in 2014 with a similar target of 52 books.  But I will try to review my reading a bit more during the year by blogging about it in Hecuba Reads (see above).







Flickr

In 2013, I took part in three Flickr challenges.  Two of them were 365 day challenges, the 2013 Photo a Day Challenge which I administer and the Happy365 challenge which Kathryn Greenhill set up.  I succeeded in doing 365 photos for both of these challenges.  I also took part in one 52 challenge, Friday Photos, a themed weekly challenge which I completed myself and which the Collingwood Historical Society completed with input from me and another member. 

In 2014 I am again participating in one 365 challenge, the 2014 Photo a Day which I am again administering, and in Challenge Friday, which is a follow on from Friday Photos in previous years.  Flickr itself set up a 52 challenge Friday Photos last year which lead to all sorts of confusion so ours has changed its name for the New Year.  The Collingwood Historical Society is also doing Challenge Friday.  I am up to date with all of these so far.  So far so good.

This all seems enough for me to do.  I will be interested to review it in twelve months.  What challenges have you set yourselves?  I'll be interested to read about them.

#blog12daysxmas Post 11 #anz23mthings Thing 9 QR codes

I must admit that I am not really sure what to think about QR codes.  Are they are passing fad or are they just too much of a bother to read?  Certainly they do provide opportunities in libraries for links to lots of other information e.g. on a membership card or in displays. 

I have been experimenting with online tools for creating local history tours and maybe rather than doing a lot of writing for a stop a QR code linking back to where the data is would be enough.  Or would this work?  If you are doing a mobile tour on an app how do you go to another app to read the QR code?  Am I missing something?  However, the QR code I found above on interpretive signage on a walk in Virginia Beach, VA, shows a good use in local history. Minimal clear info can be provided on the board with links to more comprehensive info elsewhere, in this case a video about the history of the lighthouse.

QR codes do crop up in all sorts of places these days, although I think they are far from ubiquitous in Australia.  The one above is my ticket to a film called Nina at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF).  The tickets for MIFF sessions on its app are all QR codes which are scanned for entry.  Another use by a Councils can be found on the information board below where the City of Yarra directs people to more information about the temporary relocation of the Council Customer Service Centre. 

I have a couple of different apps loaded on my iPhone for reading QR codes.  One is called QR Reader and the other is the RedLaser app.  These are pretty simple transactions and either work ok.

I have also been part of a Flickr group called QR codes in the wild for a while.  I have illustrated this post with a couple of my contributions to that group. If you want to look at the variety of places people have found QR codes, go over to the group and have a look. I think I might has said once or twice before that I heart Flickr.

#blog12daysxmas Post 10 #anz23mthings Thing 8 Calendars

On the tenth day of Christmas I got back to #anz23mthings!   Yes, I am going to finish this in January.  No stopping me!

Thing 8's theme is Calendars. I have tried various online calendars over the years: Outlook on my home computer as a standalone, Lotusnotes at work, Outlook at work, work calendar synced with work phone, work calendar sending invites to me on home calendar and so it goes on.

I did try Google calendar a few years ago (and know plenty who use it) but I think the key thing was that my work calendar which was critical was on Lotusnotes and then Outlook.  So Google calendar was only ever going to be a duplication for me. Finally I got to a stage when I abandoned my personal Outlook calendar and just used my work Outlook which synced with my work phone for all personal and work commitments. Of course, that led to some loss of data in terms of personal appointments (eg recurring ones) and contacts when I left that POW.

These days I am pretty happy using the native calendar interface on my iPhone. Via iCloud this syncs across various iThings.  It also allows me to add calendars from other sources eg Google, Yahoo, as well as iCal.  It also syncs with my Facebook invitations and events.  And now there is also an iCloud sync with my desktop Outlook so I have even started using that calendar again.

#blog12daysxmas Post 9 Yay for Helene Blowers!

Fox Hotel , Collingwood

Yes, I am behind again but I have two posts ready to do today.

On the ninth day of Christmas I had a wonderful social media inspired time at the Fox Hotel in Collingwood.  We were having a Melbourne Flickrup for members of the #2013PAD and #fp13 Flickr groups. My involvement in both of these groups started in late 2010 when I joined the #2011PAD along with Caroline Ramsden, the only other Australian in a group that we got involved in because of UK library Twitter friends.

Those of us who gathered were @emerald_j, me, Nicky from Civica, @birdsey7, @pru (a prospective member!), and Fiona and Terence who are fiant and their two children.  Unfortunately @csmramsden, @kat_frame, @bonitoclub and Pat M2007 all couldn't make it because of other commitments or last minute ill health. How amazing that we could have a face to face gathering with more than a couple of people!  That was unbelievable in 2010.

It was great to meet the people behind the photos and work out how we were all connected. We discovered that Fiona and Terence, the non library people in the gathering, had become involved via @csmramsden's daughter.  There were those of us there who reported that we were taught by @csmramsden's father in library school.  So now there is a hash tag on Twitter #ramsdengenerations! Unfortunately we were so interested in our face to face interactions that we forgot to take photos of the people.  But photos of the Fox Hotel were taken and posted on Flickr.

Fox Hotel, Collingwood

This probably sounds like a very personal little gathering of no interest to anyone else except a few Flickr geeks.  But I think it was a very significant gathering.  I joined Flickr as part of Thing 2 (I think - the number is the query not the process) in Helene Blowers' 23 Things when we did a Victoria wide roll out of it to all public libraries. And I am still there using it as an integral part of my life. A couple of others mentioned above did that Victorian 23 Things program too.  Many of us also started experimenting with a new thing called Twitter at that time and through it we made UK contacts and so the story goes on.  And we are still there enjoying our world wide networks.

All of the Melbourne people who are mentioned above have come together virtually and physically via various combinations of Twitter, Flickr and personal connections that can be traced back to several of us doing and embracing 23 Things as part of our lives.

So I say:  Yay for Helene Blowers!

#blog12daysxmas Post 7 #anz23mthings Thing 6 Youtube+Screencasts

I am not really much into video creation, I must say.  I have been using Youtube for years and I really love the use it has for archival material.  It is great to preserve and disseminate film footage and sound archives.  These play a very special role in family and local history, and any sort of history really.

I have had a Youtube channel for a few years, but I have usually used it for videos that I have made using photos.  Sites such as Animoto and the late lamented Pummelvision have been ones I have used to document things, such as my year in photos, my uncle's life when he died, a trip to Shanghai and others.  Yes, cats have definitely featured.  But that's the web.This is my Shanghai video:




I can see a real use for this in family and local history to document a series of photos about a particular place or person. This is a very brief one I did when my uncle died, but I would like to experiment with doing some local or family history focused ones.




While doing this Thing I signed up for Vine and was amazed at the very large number of my friends who were on it.  I was also interested to see that one of the trending topics was cats.  I am a great Henri and Simon's cat fan so this was heartening to me. I haven't loaded anything to Vine yet.  I think this has a lot to do with my real aversion to jerky handheld video. For the library profession, I think it is important that we don't produce amateurish stuff that gives a bad impression.  I am sure that many members of the profession do have these skills - just not me.

And I did do a Vizify twitter video of my account today.  That showed me who my golden followers are.  You can see it here.

#blog12daysxmas Post 6 #anz23mthings Thing 5 Photos+Maps+Apps

I was determined to use the opportunity of #blog12daysxmas to get back to my #anz23mthings, particularly as I fell out of it during #blogjune and have lacked the mojo to get back to it since then. Unfortunately working on this Thing has made me feel rather disheartened.

Thing 5 of the 23 mobile things is all about a mixture of my favourite things: technology and local history.  So I should be so excited about this. We were given three apps/sites to explore Historypin and WhatwasThere which both have both apps and websites and Sepiatown which only has a website.

This combination of old and new photos and maps is something that I have long felt was a really special thing that mobile phones could do. I want to be able to walk down the street and have my phone tell me when there is something that someone has considered of historical importance nearby, show me what it used to be like and give me info about the site as well as links to further information. And yes I know someone has to research the places and input the photos and data and do the geo links.  But I am more than willing to do that if I can find a good app.

All these sites show the potential for this long term dream of mine, but unless I am really missing something none really do it for me.

SepiaTown: from here to then is a nice site but it doesn't have an app, so it only ever had the potential to succeed in part of my dream.   Unfortunately there were very few photos around me (three in the Melbourne CBD to be precise) but that's a matter of them being put up. It is fairly clean and simple site:  you search a map and find nearby photos, click on them and then you can also look at Google streetview. Or you can do a random search.  The photo and the map/streetview are adjacent to each other on the screen so I don't know how this would work in an app without being completely configured. I played around with a photo of the State Library of Victoria, and then some Random searches which mostly brought me to NYC but also France and Germany. Sepiatown focuses on specific cities and has a number of featured cities including Sydney where there are lots of photos loaded. All that I hit were from the Powerhouse, but that may have been chance.

Then I did a specific search for Athens, Greece. Not good: there seemed to be only one photo in Greece taken in Livadeia in 1947. There was no Google imagery available for the Now version of this photo.  I was interested in looking for Greece, because I was thinking about how we could use such tools for relating to our aging ethnic communities and how we could use their photos and memories.  And that's certainly not to say we can't use the tool for that purpose, just that we would be starting completely from scratch. And it looks like the Now part of it might be very limited.

WhatWasThere has both a website and an app.  Again Melbourne didn't feature highly on the agenda so in this case I decided to give in and move to North America where most of the photos seemed to be centred (er centered).  I had fun playing around with some places I knew in San Francisco. Again, you search for a location and the site goes to the Google map and brings up a list of nearby sites.  I enjoyed looking at Mission Dolores and a couple of other buildings in the Mission area.  The way this site worked was slightly different.  You got the "old" photo and then when you asked for the now the old photo was superimposed over the now and you could fade it out. Nice. Again I did a check of Athens, Greece.  There was one lovely old photo of the Agora in 1908.  But for Greece there was no Now option on offer. Not even in Athens.  Leaving aside photos belonging to our ethnic communities, there are fabulous historical photos of Athens and this could be such a great tool for documenting that history.  But apparently there is no Now for comparison.

I loaded the app for WhatWasthere and went out for a walk with it.  But as there was nothing there it wasn't very useful.  It looked like I could look at existing photos and load new ones but I couldn't work out a way to search the app ie to find the photos of Athens or San Francisco I had found on my desktop. The app seemed only to be interested in where I was.

And then we come to Historypin.  This really is the site with the most potential. I had heard about it ages ago and had the app but I had never done more than have a quick look at it.  I got off to a bad start with the app.  It kept on freezing on me or throwing me out if, for example, I tried to go to Help.  I tried deleting it and reloading it, a necessity because of the freezing.  But to no avail.  I also couldn't signin in the app as it sent me to a place on the website where I got a message that the page was unknown.  Sigh.

So I went to my desktop and opened the website.  Setting up an id was fine through Google+, Twitter or Facebook and I created one.  I played around on the site looking at all the Channels that had been set up by different organizations and individuals, and also the Tours though I was a bit irritated that you appeared only to be able to browse the Tours not search them. There are good FAQs for loading photos and other processes.  I went on a couple of Tours in NYC and was quite excited about the prospect of doing a little trial tour for myself. I looked at the map locally and found quite a few photos.  So I worked out my tour which was going to be linked to the Collingwood Historical Society Hotels  Database. There was one photo of a hotel already there and I thought I would add a few more in the street and create a tour.

I headed off with my phone but alas and alack I still couldn't sign in on the app even though I now had a valid id.  It still kept on sending me out of the app to the site to a message that the page requested couldn't be found. This meant I couldn't really do much with the app,eg I couldn't take photos. Also strangely the nearby photos that appeared on the website never came up on the app. I took photos and came home. I wondered if my lack of access to the app had something to do with my phone?  I remembered I had loaded the app on my ancient (well a couple of years old) iPod and checked there.  Again I couldn't sign in and got sent to the same page missing part of the site.  But I did manage to get into Help which I had not been able to do on my iPhone. So I sent an email explaining my issues.  The result was immediate:




Eventually I found another email address on the website and so I wait for a response about the app.  I do have photos and I will experiment setting up a Tour but it is very frustrating not to have mobile access. And yes there are also lots of lovely photos on the Greek map. But unless I am missing something the only way I can see streetview on Historypin is if it has been incorporated into a tour?  I'll have to try to create a Greek one to see if there are any options.

Meanwhile, I need to delete the Historypin app and reinstall it again as it has hung again.

I still have my dream, but I do wonder why all these sites only allow loading of photos from live camera or your own files.  I would love to be able to load stuff from Flickr or websites like Trove.  It would also be good to have interactive links as I found one example of a photo on HistoryPin with an incorrect caption that has been corrected on the main website.

#blog12daysxmas Post 3 #librarysecretsanta

#librarysecretsanta 2013 H365/361 #happy365

One of the very pleasant outcomes of being part of an Australian library community on Twitter is that I get to take part in the annual #librarysecretsanta project.  I have taken part in this for the last few years and have had great fun researching my allocated twitter colleague and trying to find an appropriate present that is postable and costs $10 max.

I received my  #librarysecretsanta present on 23 December.  So thanks to my gifter for pulling out plugs and sending it Express post all the way from W.A. I did tweet its arrival on the day according to rules but I have been a bit slack taking and posting a photo.  But today is the day and it is done! It's here and it's on Flickr and I'll be tweeting it after I finish this blogpost.

We have a #librarysecretsanta Flickr group too, so you can go over there to have a look at photos of presents people have received over the last few years if you wish. I see that not many people have posted their gift photos to the group this year - or last year for that matter.  That's a pity as it is nice to see what ideas people have come up with.  It also allows us to use another bit of social media for connectivity.  I love that, but maybe everyone else in the library community doesn't? I would be interested in hearing about the community's views on this.

And what was my gift?  It was a BOOK. Yes, I am shouting that to the hills. A P-BOOK!  In fact one of only two books I got for Christmas :(   One of my greatest joys at Christmas from when I was very little was the receiving of new books as gifts.   So I really associate Christmas with books.   And obviously my gifter had checked out my interest in Greek and Roman classics and ancient history. Thanks #librarysecretsanta gifter!  It is a very appropriate gift.

#blog12daysxmas Post 1 Christmas Day technology

Christmas pudding H365/359 #happy365

Well here I am starting @blog12daysxmas late again.  It's Boxing Day in Melbourne and the first day of Christmas was yesterday.  So I am already in catch up mode. I realized today that my last blog post on this blog was for my not-fully-completed #blogjune challenge.  Oh well! I guess I just need a challenge to spur me along.

But technology and Web 2.0 were alive and well for me yesterday and show to me the importance of that 23 things program I did all those years ago. On Christmas Day, Twitter (actually my Echofon app) and Facebook and Flickr were all there with me at the beginning of the day as I greeted my online friends all over the world,  responded to their greetings and festive wishes, and looked at photos of their life at Christmas.

Xmas vegetables 365/359 #2013PAD

As with every day in 2013, on the first day of Christmas I posted photos on Flickr for my two daily 2013 photo challenges #2013PAD and Kathryn Greenhill's #happy365. I took the photos on my phone, uploaded them via my FlickStackr app, edited them via Aviary, edited them in the Flickr app, and duly added them to the appropriate groups.  Yes, I have done this for every day of 2013 up to day 359 which was Christmas Day, the first day of Christmas. 

I have illustrated this post with the photos I took for these two Flickr groups as a tangible illustration of the integral role technology plays in my life. It is very hard to remember a time when these tools were not part of my life.

Why do we do it to ourselves? #blogjune Day 11

Why indeed do we do it to ourselves?  Early in June I raised in a comment to a post of @flexnib the question of why we set ourselves these challenges. I seem to be finding #blogjune particularly hard this year and I have been wondering why. This year for #blogjune I have set myself the task of doing 60 blogposts, 30 on this blog Hecuba's story, and 30 for the Collingwood Historical Society blog.

It didn't seem so hard last year, or have I forgotten?  Last year I did #blogjune for myself but rather than limiting myself to this blog which is about technology I scattered my posts over three of my blogs and talked about quite different things.  I created recipes and blogged about them, I read books and reviewed them, and I did posts on technology.  It was easier somehow to diversify.  We also did #blogjune in MPOW.  But we divided the 30 posts amongst three blogs and @tapsister developed a roster.  I was responsible for ensuring that the requisite number of posts were done on Telling Tales, the family and local history blog, but I sub-rostered some of that out to @bookwoman2000.

So this year I decided to stick to my technology blog and have a mini-challenge within a challenge. I think I decided this partly because of #anz23mthings.  And it's good.  It is causing me to thing about why I use apps and to talk about tech things. But it is harder, if I am honest with myself.  And Collingwood Historical Society?  So far I have done all the blogposts myself and there are certainly many things to post about.  But I think that I am going to ask for assistance - ask for topics people would like to see blogposts about, ask for people to write them! In fact that sounds like a good blogpost for today and won't require me to do the research I was going to do for a couple of others. I would really like more people engaging with the blog and this is one way to do it.

But to return to the initial question? Why do we do it?  Each year I set myself annual challenges and I usually blog about them in the course of another challenge the #blog12daysxmas, both in retrospect and in prospect.  This year was no exception.   I have probably posted enough here about why I heart Flickr and it plays a big role in my challenges. But I had really intended to post today about another challenge I do most years and use technology to monitor.

Goodreads! Goodreads!  Yes, each year I set myself a challenge of the minimum number of books I want to read.  I started doing this a few years ago when I was worried that I wasn't reading and was losing my book knowledge.  Yes, the tech stuff was always there to overtake it.  I reviewed various online tools at the time and finally decided to go with Goodreads.

I am always modest in the goals I set myself as I don't want to set myself up for failure.  Nor do I want to make reading, something I have loved all my life, a chore that needs completing.  So this year I have set myself the modest goal of 52 titles in 2013.  One a week. So how easy is this?  I set myself an annual challenge of 52 books, I record everything I read on Goodreads. Wrong!  Goodreads apparently doesn't like me rereading titles and doesn't count them in the total for the challenge.  Me, I love rereading and relishing old favourites. But I have a way around this.  I register the books I read in 2013 on my "read in 2013" shelf.  I know that I have 53 books on that shelf currently and 7 of those are ones that are works in progress.  So according to my calculations I am well in advance of my challenge. Unfortunately Goodreads thinks I have read many fewer.

Does anyone know how I can get Goodreads to count my rereads as part of my annual reading challenge?  It probably doesn't matter much in the scheme of things but I wish I could do it. #firstworldproblems

#blog12daysxmas Day 5 Flickr Photo A Day Challenge

One of the things that I blogged about last year in the #blog12daysxmas challenge was the Flickr challenges that I was setting myself for the coming year, i.e. 2012. So how have I gone with them?  I signed myself up to contribute to two different challenges and in some cases was participating for more than one Flickr user.

The first challenge that I was part of was the 2012 Photo a Day Challenge that is administered by @sarahgb in the UK.  I participated in her 2011 PAD Challenge and was keen to do this one.  Of course, being a leap year it meant that I needed to do 366 photos this year.  Today I posted my 365th photo so I am nearly there! I have really loved doing this every day.  I have found that it really made to look at things around me quite differently and has also provided a good summary of the year 2012 for me to look back on.  Last year on @pollyalida's  suggestion, I made my 2011PAD photos into a Pummelvision video which I loaded on Youtube.  Here is it:



I would love to do the same for 2012 but unfortunately Pummelvision is no more so I will be looking for other options in the New Year.  So if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.

I certainly loved doing the Flickr PAD in 2011 and 2012.  So I am planning on doing it again in 2013.  Maybe some of my #blog12daysxmas colleagues would like to join up?  It is a great exercise.  My friend Sarah is bowing out this year after three years worth of PAD and has handed the mantle over to me to continue.  I have set up a Flickr 2013 Photo a Day Challenge at www.flickr.com/groups/2013pad/ so just head over there and join up for the fun.  I was amazed when I did a search how many photo a day groups there are on Flickr!  But this is my one:) It has my Loupe dove (again inspired by @pollyalida) as the avatar.

#blog12daysxmas Day 11 Who is Hecuba and what is she to me?

This is about Web 2.0 although it may not appear so at first. There has been a bit of discussion in the last day or so about how one decides on Twitter handles and such like. @shewgirl did a blogpost on it and @bonitoclub forwarded a post he had done a while ago about the historical origins of his name. I commented on this and made an aside about the banality of my Twitter name. I thought it was so obvious! But apparently not! I thought there were lots of clues in this blog and even in my current Twitter avatar. Maybe my #secretsanta this year knew?

Like @shewgirl my name has its origins back in 2007 when we were all doing the 23things project in Victoria. To this day I don't understand why anonymity was required but it was and like @shewgirl I spent ages tossing around trying to find a Google identity so that I could set up the required blog. It was just too hard! Then suddenly like a flash it hit me! I was going to be Polyxena and my blog was going to be Hecuba's Story.

To this day, I am not really sure why I came up with those two names. I do know that they were called after my cats, Polyxena and her daughter Hecuba. But why I came up with them in that order or at all is a mystery. I think one of the reasons was some wise advice given to me a few years earlier by an online friend. I was mourning the death of my much adored cat, Messalina, who had been there for me throughout my cancer treatment - and lots of other things. My friend from the BreastCancerList told me that one thing he had done to celebrate his cats who had died was to call new email addresses etc after them so that he remembered and celebrated them every time he used the account.

Once I had my Google identity as Polyxena, I started using it elsewhere and when I started up my Twitter account later on, well of course I was going to try for that moniker and it was available. So that is where Polyxena comes from. My white Xena's name and her ginger girl, Hecuba, form most of my online identity. And where did the feline Polyxena's name come from? Well, as some of you know that was a sheer mistake :)

The Story of Polyxena on Storybird

#blog12daysxmas Day 9 Tumblr

One of the challenges for me when I participate in these blogging challenges is that although I have three blogs they really have quite narrow parameters i.e. technology, reading and cooking. I am not complaining about that and it is exactly how I want those blogs to be. However, if I want to put up a photo (apart from Flickr), jot down a paragraph about the photo, or just make some general comments I really can't do it on my existing blogs.

One of the tasks I set myself for this #blog12daysxmas was to explore possibilities. In fact I didn't get very far with my exploring. For Day 3 of #blog12daysxmas I set myself up a Tumblr account. I know lots of people have been using Tumblr for ages but I guess I am just a bit slow. It was easy to set up a template and I experimented with a few of the free ones until I ended up which one I liked. It looks like an old-fashioned airmail letter and seemed appropriate for my Tumblr which is called Hecuba's Reflections: virtual comments winging their way to you. This automatically provided a link to my Twitter feed, my Tumblr likes and the Tumblr accounts I am following. I haven't explored if I can customize it myself but I should do that.



I like the way you can quickly insert a range of things from the top of the dashboard - text, photos, quotes, links, chat, audio and video. And I quickly discovered that I could link back from Flickr with my photos there or from Youtube with video. It took me a little while to work out what happened on the dashboard apart from composing as I had some difficulty working out how to follow people. But now that I am following a few I can see how everyone's post scroll through there and you can see the history of the posts and who has favorited/reblogged yours. Exploring Tumblr found me some really interesting visual sites to follow.

So I am sold on Tumblr. I think it is a great little tool for communicating and that there is some really interesting and creative stuff on there that is quite different from the regular blogpost. My main issue is that I can find very few friends on there. Maybe it is because very few are on Tumblr but I doubt it somehow. If you are on Tumblr and you want to visit me or follow me I am there as Hecuba's reflections.

#blog12daysxmas Day 8 Pummelvision 2011PAD

For the last year I have been submitting photos to the Flickr group #2011 PAD or photo a day. There have been about 50 of us doing this: I say about 50 as people have come and gone over the year and started in midstream. These have mainly been UK library people with three or four of us from Australia, well Melbourne really.

This was quite a challenge for me that I got into because of my online friends @sarahgb in Wales and @csmramsden in Melbourne. I found it quite hard to get into the habit of remembering to take a photo and remembering to upload it. My tactic for the days I missed ended up being to look at which of my Flickr photos had been viewed by someone on the missing day. That led to some quite interesting inclusions and I often pondered and ponder why anyone had been looking at them. You can see my set here with its 365 photos. That was a learning too: number the photos!


I had been using Flickr for quite a while - since I learned and posted about it in this blog when I was doing 23things all those years back - but I found I learned so much about the possibilities of Flickr by doing this challenge. Previously I really hadn't explored groups and now am amazed at what is on there. I didn't know how to load directly to Twitter and Facebook. Duh! I was copying and pasting the url. Or into groups. I initially went to the group to do it and finally the penny dropped and I realized that I could do it from the image. I am sure there is so much more there to learn.


So yesterday was the end of the challenge and I wondered how I could review my life in photos in 2011. Fortunately my Twitter friend @jobeaz had finished another 365 project herself and had been experimenting with various ways to present them when our US friend @pollyalida stepped in and suggested Pummelvision. So I thought I would give it a go too as my other favorite, Animoto, wasn't going to let me do 365 images - well, at least not in the free version.

Pummelvision was simple and easy to use. Once I had opened the url, it asked me where my photos were to be fetched from (Flickr) and where I wanted the resulting video to be posted (Youtube). I had to do permissions for both of them, decide on one of two music options, indicate which photos I wanted included and their order, provide an email address, and press go! It took a while for the video to be made so don't be disheartened at that. Then the url appeared on the Pummelvision site and I was also sent an email with the url.

Here is the resulting video. You will find some things a little out of order as I discovered yesterday that some photos hadn't been added to the set but just to the group and vice versa. That is a big learning for next year when hopefully I will keep better track.



Well, what do you think? I was surprised yesterday to discover that only 11/365 photos related to books and blogged about it over on Hecuba Reads. It has been fascinating to look back at themes of flowers, streetscapes, buildings, landscapes, friends, family and colleagues, food and cooking, family and local history and above all my photogenic kitteh, Polyxena.

We had decided to do a different challenge in 2012: Friday Photos 2012 which will involve themed photos. I was excited to join up that challenge and we have joined up the City of Boroondara Library Service as well. So please join in if you wish. We will have fun getting to know each other through our photos.

But yesterday I was feeling rather wistful about not doing the PAD any more, particularly as I felt I had just started to get into it. I found myself telling Xena that she would not have as many photos for people to admire in 2012! However, fortunately a few others felt the same and in the middle of the night here (1/1) and on New Year's eve in Wales @sarahgb set up the new group at the eleventh hour! I have already posted my first 2012PAD and guess who is in it?