Our task for thing 7 was to create a ‘Flickr’ account. The sign up process was pretty easy considering I already have a Yahoo! ID. Uploading the photos was relatively simple too. I like that you can upload your chosen photos at one time. It saves the time hassle of having to upload each photo one by one, especially when you have quite a few.
I also had a go at putting my pictures in to different sets and once again, it was very quick and easy to do. Here is a screen shot of the sets:

I haven’t used many other photo-sharing sites, but I have used photobucket in the past. Flickr is better in terms of layout, as it has a much cleaner look, but it has been ages since i’ve used photobucket, so I should have a look and see if they’ve improved it since then.

My Flickr name is ‘Henna1986′, if anyone wants to take a look.

My task at this stage was to subscribe to RSS feeds. In order to do this, I needed to sign up to a feed reader. As I have a Google ID, I could automatically sign up to Google reader. After doing that, I decided on a few blogs/websites to receive updates from. I have included the ’23 things Oxford’ blog itself, as well as a couple of other fellow ’23′ bloggers. To stay in touch with up to the minute news, i’ve added Yahoo news to my list too. I have also added RSS feeds from 3 other websites I enjoy visiting frequently.

I think having Google reader is quite useful, as you don’t have to visit individual sites to access information you would want to see on a regular basis. So it’s definitely a more convenient way of staying up to date with information you are particularly interested in.

I can see my name on the sidebar of the 23 things blog, so that must mean i’m registered. Yaye

So our third task was to set up a blog to keep record of how we’re doing with our ’23 things’. This is not the first time i’ve had a blog. However, the previous two differed in 2 ways:
1.They were personal blogs, kinda like an online journal/diary.
2.They were both done using blogger.

So this time, I decided I should try something different and a little more challenging and so I opted to use WordPress. I have to say at first it wasn’t so simple for me. The layout compared to Blogger when logged in is more confusing at first; But after some time exploring, things do become more easier. For example, when it came to editing your posts or changing the settings under comments, it took me numerous attempts to figure out what category on the sidebar they would come under. But with time and more experience, this would become more simpler.

The most difficult thing for me was figuring out how to apply the theme I wanted for my blog. I got around that problem by adding my blog to my husband and I’s personal website. We’d already bought our hosting for our personal site, which luckily came with WordPress already installed. So all I had to do was download the template and then upload it to the site. Then ‘apply’ the theme under the ‘appearance’ setting. I wouldn’t consider myself competent with computers at all, so to find a solution to this problem any other way would have been too challenging!

From my experiences so far setting up blogs using Blogger and WordPress, I have noticed that Blogger was far easier to set up. Also, if you wanted to add your blog to an existing site, it’s much easier doing so through Blogger, but only simple with WordPress if your host site already supports it. However, the downfall with Blogger is that it is limited to a few themes and does not allow you to edit comments, whereas with WordPress, you have access to loads of free themes and you can also edit comments. These are the pros and cons i’ve experienced thus far, I will update you with any further discoveries as I continue to use WordPress.

I’m really happy with the final outcome. I like the fact that i’m learning something new with each task. This method of learning is gradual and does not inundate you with too much to do. Looking through other people’s blogs I can see that we all are at different levels of experience (and i’m somewhat relieved that we aren’t all computer geeks like my husband ), but I think that is a good thing! This way we can all help and learn from one another, good luck everyone

So thing 2 was about setting up an iGoogle page. As soon as I logged in, what I needed to do seemed straight forward enough . It was fun testing out the gadgets. There were some that I initially thought would be quite interesting, but turned out to be disappointing; for example some of the optical illusion ones. I am happy with my hamster though

Once i’d selected the gadgets I wanted the layout was still all over the place, so I did need to move the gadgets around until they seemed to fit well together on the page. But it wasn’t until I changed the theme of my page that it really put everything into place.

I didn’t realise how useful an iGoogle page could be for me, until I did this exercise. But now I can see myself using it quite often.

Ok, so step 1 is to setup a Google ID. As I have one already, I don’t need to… That was easy enough!

Henna Xx