Thing #10 - Image Generators

I found an image generator that allows you to customize a birthday cake -- both with the numbers on the candles and with the text. "Jelly" is my mother and her 83rd birthday will be on November 1. She was born in 1926 -- the same year that Queen Elizabeth of England was born. The site I used was ImageChef and I was able to post the photo directly to Blogger using a button on the ImageChef site. I followed the "More" button under Send as E-Card /Share (which had an option to e-mail a greeting or to post to Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, or a social network) and then under "Quick post."

Finishing Thing #9

Today I actually subscribed to a blog using the Feeds function of Internet Explorer. I was curious about how it would work from the viewpoint of a blog, also, so I chose my own GenealogyClassBlog as my test.

I had not enabled any kind of RSS feed on my blog, which is based on WordPress. Apparently that isn't necessary, because when I entered the URL of my blog, www.desktopgenerations.com/blog, and when the page had loaded I saw that the new Feeds icon in the toolbar of my browser was orange. When I checked, I found that my blog's name was listed so I clicked and the feed loaded in my browser window, showing the 10 most recent posts. I clicked a link to subscribe to the feed, so now I'm subscribed from my work blog to my personal blog -- pretty cool. Of course, I'll already know when there are new postings, but now that I'm subscribed, I may even be able to experiment with other functionality from one blog to another.

Thing #9 - RSS Feeds

This was tough. But at the same time, it was interesting. It was tough because there were so many temptations. It was difficult to remember my objective. I posted earlier about my experience with Bloglines.

Sindic8 didn't really work too well for me. There was too much peripheral information relating to the status of the feeds, I guess. And, the first topic I used as a search term brought several audio feeds when I wasn't really interested in audio.

I had used Technorati before and had some good results with it.

I had a problem with clicking on the Bloglines icon to subscribe to two different feeds. Both times Bloglines would load, but the feed's URL didn't load. I had better success using a "Sub with Bloglines" button that I'd added to my browser.

I'm still working on learning to use Internet Explorer to subscribe to feeds. At least now I have a "Feeds" button!

Quick Trips: Eppingen, Germany, offers a bevy of half-timbered buildings | Stars and Stripes

Quick Trips: Eppingen, Germany, offers a bevy of half-timbered buildings Stars and Stripes

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Well, I am learning about subscribing to RSS feeds, which has always been somewhat intimidating to me. And now, in my first attempt I have accidentally created a blog post instead. I used Bloglines' Search function to find a posting, but instead of finding a colorful list called, "Subscribe," I found Bookmark & Share, a very long colorful list with some familiar icons, including Del.icio.us, Twitter, Google Translate, and the one I chose -- Bloglines. But, since I have this opportunity to post this link, I decided to follow it through.

Eppingen is a small town that my daughter and I visited in Germany in April, with the help of our new friend, Werner Zwickel, from nearby Berwangen. He knew that Eppingen was an attraction to visitors so he led us over by road (he on a motorcycle and we in our rented Picaso) and gave us a tour on foot.