A small thing

In my world of things calendars look like this!

This is a calendar which I inherited from my Gran. It always sat on her windowsill overlooking the garden and she religiously changed it everyday whilst watching the birds. When I went to stay I had the job of changing it which always felt an honour. This is a small but still very special thing.

And now for something completely different! Decided to kill two birds with one stone and use Doodle to set up a meeting with staff at Winchester School of Art Library whereas normally I would have automatically gone to Outlook. I found it very easy and fun to use and I like the ability to offer up lots of days and times which is not so easy on Outlook.I didn't like all the adverts popping up but that's just something you have to deal with and try to filter out. I still think that Outlook will be my default option for work but I would definitely use this when organising future social events with family and friends. That said a small spanner in the works of this idea is that my parents haven't got a computer. Back to the telephone!

I had already added Doodle to Netvibes as part of that activity but interestingly I forgot to go to my Netvibes page as a quick way to access it. Netvibes is still not a go-to thing...

I'd rather be making things than doing 23 Things

I am forcing myself to find the time to look at Netvibes when really I'd rather be joining the first year students in the foyer at WSA experimenting with every kind of printmaking...

However, I was determined to see what Netvibes could offer me.When I hit the first hurdle within seconds (it took three attempts before I correctly transcribed the letters in the 'are you human?' section of registering) I was quickly frustrated. Having no previous experience of personalised dashboards I approached Netvibes with caution. Within seconds my dashboard was populated with an overwhelming amount of information, most of which I wasn't interested in at all. Netvibes immediately became the enemy and I really disliked how busy the screen looked. I longed for simplicity and started striking off all the irrelevant information. Following this rather violent attack, I started to rebuild.

I took a different approach and decided to create a new dashboard for artists' books, a particular area of interest of mine both at work and personally. I found that if I searched for "artists' books" in inverted commas my results were reassuringly smaller and a hundred percent more relevant. Encouraged by this I started to add relevant widgets and links, including the Sot23things RSS feed, although frustratingly some of the widgets didn't work.

I think at this stage of Sot23things, I can be bold enough to say that this could be a useful tool, and that I intend to create several subject specific dashboards for different areas of interest and work. I intend to explore Netvibes over the coming weeks to see how useful it proves to be.