The SimpleViewer plugin adds a little button to the  editing toolbar that pulls up a control panel. Photos can be pulled from a flickr account or your WordPress photo uploads. There are a few settings for size and style. But nothing complicated or confusing! This is truly simple and elegant. I think this is my new favorite WordPress plugin!

p.s.  For some unknownable reason, this plugin worked fine on another WordPress site, but wasn’t working here. After a day or two and much research, it works. But not for any reason that makes sense.  Maybe I just clicked the mouse a little harder today. Yep, that’s it.

This idea is just so functional and elegant. I’m going to download the alpha version right now!

An Introduction to Firefox’s Tab Candy from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Check out their project page for more information.

(found via: Perpetual Beta – if you’re not reading this blog, you should be!)

A Day in the Life of a Library… Whether you are a librarian or library worker of any kind, help us share and learn about the joys and challenges of working in a library. Join us by sharing details of your day for a week on your blog..Not only is this a great way for us to see what our colleagues are doing and how they spend their days but it’s a great way for students who are interested in the library profession to see what we really do.

As an independent consultant who works from home, my days are probably a bit different than most library staff. Or maybe they aren’t? You decide.

Since I know I’m not likely to blog about my days, I’m using a nifty tool called QuoteURL to capture my tweets about #libday5 and display them here.

1. 
   pollyalida RT @sphericalfruit: Non-librarian followers: what’s #libday5? It’s a web-wide initiative for librarians to report their work. Ever wonde … 26 Jul 2010 from web
2. 
   pollyalida Today’s the first day of Library Day in the Life / Round 5, July 26th, 2010 http://ow.ly/2gR5X R U participating? #libday5 26 Jul 2010 from HootSuite
3. 
   pollyalida http://yfrog.com/17hvgwj 1 goal 4 this week- clean up my office! Been a very busy few months & it’s out of control. #libday5 26 Jul 2010 from Seesmic for Android
4. 
   pollyalida Spent much of the afternoon looking for YA book trailers 4 summer reading site: http://ow.ly/2gRDm #libday5 26 Jul 2010 from HootSuite
5. 
   pollyalida Caught up on some reading of articles tweeted by colleagues. #libday5 26 Jul 2010 from web

— this quote was brought to you by quoteurl

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be upgrading the WP server I use for classes and updating my class to cover the new features.

Aviary is a free suite of tools for creating and editing images and sound. The image editing tool includes advanced features like layers and masks. There’s a color editing tool, a vector drawing tool and more.

And they’ve just added a Music Creation (Roc) tool. Even the most unmusical among us (me!) can create some great little bits of music.  Save your creations and use the Myna Audio editor to create a complete song, the track editing, mixing and special effects are amazing in Myna.

I wish I had a free week to spend playing with all these features. If you make some beautiful music, please share!

Think you don’t have time to be that person in your library or school who sees new trends and opportunities ahead? Think again!  And take a few minutes to read this great strategy from Elisabeth Doucett in American Libraries: 10 Tips for Tracking Trends

• Step 1: Identify potential sources of information for societal and library trend tracking.
• Step 2: Develop a method for regularly reviewing those resources.
• Step 3: Search social networking sites.
• Step 4: Review each idea that you pulled out of your research, considering potential implications for your library.
• Step 5: Leave your idea list in a file until you start the same process the next week.
• Step 6: When you identify the ideas that you want to pursue for your library, get together with some of your fellow librarians to help you review the ideas and find the good and bad about them.

Read her article for more!

I’m really looking forward to seeing the finished project with all the linked posters!

How to:

• Drop the bookmarklet on your browser toolbar
• Use the search page to locate photos in flickr or search flickr directly.
• Click on the bookmarklet.
• Choose what size photo you want to use
• Copy the code for use on your web/blog/wiki pages.

And voila!

by pollyalida

Flower Power

What a fun way to connect with your community, offer a service that many people would be happy to use and benefits the library. It’s very easy to think of programs and summer projects to go along with fundraiser. How about a community garden at the library, followed by a harvest feast?

This fundraising page is for the Hadley-Luzerne (NY) Library, part of  the Southern Adirondack Library System.

Blackbird Pie

A new way to capture individual tweets to post on your web page or blog posts.

To make a handy image like this one, you could use a screencapture tool, crop to size and upload the image to your blog or website. Not too hard, but not as fast as with Blackbird Pie. Just grab the URL for a tweet and pop it into Blackbird Pie. Youll get a chunk of code that you just copy and paste to the place where the image should appear.

NOTE: to get the URL for a twitter post, click on the date when the tweet was posted. It’s just below the post. And I confess that I didn’t notice that for ages!

Google had a makeover!

Another update to the Google Search page. All the search options are still on the left, they’re just being displayed a bit differently. Which is a very good thing! Seems many, many people hadn’t even noticed the link to “More Options” that has been there for almost a year now. Terrific that these search refinement options are much more visible now.

E.ggTimer

Ever say things like “take have 5 minutes to work on the next exercise” I do, but I never time it. Sometimes I should and now I can. Check out this handy and easy to use egg timer. Here’s a 5 minute timer. Love it! (via: lemasney – twitter)