Image generators - Cool text

Similarly to most other comments regarding Cool Text, I found this to be the least useful and very outdated in style and appearence and reminds me of some of the early luridly coloured websites that you would commonly come across on the web.

Big Huge Labs was quite easy to use and I liked the way you could conect easily to other web services like facebook and flickr, this has potential for repurposing your own work in a number of ways and I think I may well use this again for brightening up blog posts.

Letter James, what I liked about this was the ability to personalise images and again I would use this I feel to add relevancy to the group of users I am addressing in the blog, rather than a generalised image.

Image generators - Big Huge Labs

Image generators - letter james

Creative Commons

Em's 23 things by Emma Mires is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at em23things.blogspot.com.

Flickr

It has taken me longer to do this than I expected, much of the delay seems to be due to difficulties with the yahoo account which I set up a very long time ago and passwords etc had escaped me.

Once I had resolved the yahoo issues then it was fairly straightforwards to upload some pictures, I usually use facebook to share and view pictures with friends.

RSS

I had already signed up for Google reader previously in order to feed relevant built environment updates from other sources into the subject blog.

I too initially needed to remember to login to the Google reader to keep up to speed with all the feeds, however now that I have set iGoogle as my homepage I have added it as a gadget so that it is much easier to check new feeds and filter categories i.e 23things or architectural resources.

I tried both browsing & searching within the reader and also directly adding via sites using RSS icon, personally I found the reader was slightly easier in terms of using within one interface.

I particularly liked this from daily dose of architecture feed, a project site for Mexico Public Library...now that is some serious stacks.

Blogging

Now that I have created the basics for the blog, I am going to use this opportunity to explore some of the other elements I could incorporate.

This will also benefit my other blog for Architecture & the Built Enviroment as I haven't really revisited/evaluated it's design since I created it and I know it can be improved. I really want to look at ways of encouraging interactivity via comments and try to build up a web 2.0 dialogue in particular for the subject based blog - so this will be something for me to investigate.

First post

Hi,

So this is my first blog post for 23 things - a little delayed but better late than never. I keep a blog for architecture and the built environment and have experimented in the past with blogs as a visual diary to record ideas that could be developed into something creative at a later stage.

For the task #1 I set about personalising my Google ipage, results below:

I really like the idea of having all this type of information at my fingertips and am pleased it was one of the tasks for 23 things. Particularly as it is something I had thought about creating before after being inspired by one of Phil Bradley's courses where he demonstrated some of the home/start pages he had set up using other web 2.0 applications (netvibes, pageflakes etc.)

I am going to make a concerted effort to maintain this and like Ellie perhaps use it as my homepage so it encourages me to make the best use of it!