Trying something new « the [grad school] adventures of erin*carly

Trying something new

03Nov09

(and hopefully both time-saving and informative)

Val Hoeppner lead an APME session on free and cheap training and management materials available online, and I had the pleasure actually listening (instead of taking photos) to her discussion. I’ve yet to go through her entire list of goodies, but one that stuck out in my mind as a handy tool was the Google Reader.

I gave the reader a go a while back and promptly gave up after adding just a few feeds. For one, it was ugly. And being an image-based thinker, plain text just didn’t cut it. And a few blogs I followed were ‘friends-only’ and didn’t allow me to see the posts in my reader.

So off it went into oblivion . . . until today.

I spent a good chunk of this morning and evening setting up feeds – photoblogs of colleagues and friends, industry related links like NPPA and PDN, news sites like the Washington Post, Washington Times and the AP, and guilty pleasure sites like xkcd and PostSecret. Topping off the feed-blitz was the addition of the Better GReader 0.8 add-on for Firefox to make the reader less ugly. (Automatic previews are slower, but much prettier. I like reading the stories in their original format.)

Hopefully all this time invested in getting everything set up will help save time in the future while enriching my knowledge of the world around me and keep me up-to-date with awesome photography.

Or it’ll just encourage my incessant procrastination.