"Cool Stuff"

1) Blog Readability Test (BRT)
A couple of other people here have mentioned their blogs got a "Genius" rating from this test, and mine did too. The BRT gives no information about how it assigns rankings, so I suspected that it gives EVERY blog a genius rating. I tested it with three blogs that I thought would be readable by the average high schooler or below. Here are the blogs and their ratings:

--Paris Hilton fan blog. Rated: College (Post-grad)
--Steven Seagal blog. Rated: College (Under-grad)
--Hannah Montana fan blog. Rated: Elementary level

The Hannah Montana blog was definitely elementary level, so BRT gains a little credibility with that one. But only a little!

2) Sketchcast
I created my masterpiece, "Spring," with Sketchcast. It expresses the simple beauty of a lovely spring flower sprouting up through the ground and growing steadily in the alternating warmth of sun and raindrops from cloudy skies. Seriously, though, Sketchcast is basically an animation device for an etch-a-sketch-quality medium. Not much choice in line, color or any other effects.

3) Delicious redux
My computer's hard drive has self-destructed. Among other things, I lost all the bookmarks I had carefully saved in folders on my browser toolbar. So I feel more motivated than I was earlier to learn how to put my bookmarks on an external server. I started to set up a wiki (using Peanut Butter Wiki), but then thought I'd try delicious instead. So I'll see how it goes.

Delicious aka del.icio.us

Thoughts on del.icio.us (the website, not the pie):

1) Unfortunately, a permissions problem blocked my efforts to add the two delicious buttons to my toolbar in both Explorer and Firefox.

2) User Notes. Hmmm. What is their purpose? I suppose they're intended as the electronic equivalent of a yellow post-it. But with good tagging, many of the notes I saw today seemed pretty superfluous.

3) I can see delicious being helpful with projects I've had that involve creating lists of URLs on particular topics. I may try using delicious with an upcoming project, depending on how much time it takes me to figure out the particulars to do it right!

4) This is one 2.0 application that I need to practice when time allows. I want to be able to add & tag websites easily, when I have spare moments here and there.