Howe Library Annual Meeting
October 11, 2012
The Howe Library continues to impress with innovation, a rich collection, and a welcoming comfortable environment.
Three highlights in technology from the annual meeting :
1. Five-Year technology plan for 2012-2017 recently added to the website
2. A new mobile version of the website. It keeps the same look and feel, but with key features available on mobile, with easy access to the regular website. And yes, it does auto-detect mobile devices.
- Getting the Most from Your Town’s Email Discussion List and Website (October 25)
- Computer Basics: Getting Started with a Computer (November 15)
- Buying and Selling Online Using eBay (January 17)
- Computer Basics: Staying on the Safe Side of the Internet (February 21)
- Backing Up your Computer: Where to Start (March 21)
- Computer Basics: Getting the Most from Email (April 18)
- Desktop, Laptop, Tablet, Smartphone:Which Is Best for You ? (May 16)
Google Calendar Event Colors
December 14, 2011
This new feature was introduced to Google Calendar in May 2011, and it allows you to choose a specific color for an event. The default color is the same as the calendar color. However, this event color is only visible to you, or to those that have full access to the calendar (“Make changes AND manage sharing “). More info from Google
So use this feature for your personal calendar, but don’t bother for a calendar that will be embedded on a website.
Facebook Instant Personalization
January 10, 2011
What is Facebook Instant Personalization? It’s an option, which you enable or disable in your Facebook Privacy Settings, which gives Facebook permission to share your public information with selected partners. Important phrase…PUBLIC INFORMATION. Keep in mind that public information is the stuff you’ve told Facebook you’re comfortable with everyone seeing. Here’s how Facebook defines public information:
When you have this feature enabled and then go to one of Facebook’s partner sites, the site will inform you that they are providing you with customized content. For example, if you have selected The Rolling Stones as a band that you like on your Facebook profile and then go to Pandora, a Facebook partner site, the music site may play music from The Stones because it knows you like them. There’s a rumor that Facebook is poised to give your information to non-partner websites. These websites might not inform you that they are using your own public information to provide you with customized content. In fact, who knows what they might do with your public information.
Whether its partner sites or non-partner sites, Facebook sharing your public information isn’t the main problem. (That isn’t to say that we’re really psyched about the concept.) The real problem lies in Facebook users not understanding the Facebook Privacy Settings and how to manage them. There’s a very simple fix, though. Just do the following in Facebook:
- Go to Account.
- Select Privacy Settings
- Go to the bottom, left of the page and click on Apps & Websites
- Go down the page and look for Instant Personalization. Click the Edit Setting button to the right. (At this point, you can and should watch a short video prepared by Facebook which aims to help you understand the concept of Instant Personalization.)
- Go down to the bottom of the page and uncheck the Select Edit Settings and then uncheck “Enable”.
It is important to understand, if your friends don’t do this as well, they may be sharing information about you so, give them the link to this post so they can follow the simple steps as well.
Listen, we’re not saying Facebook does no evil. We’re just saying, just like in real life, in the online world you can limit your exposure by educating yourself and taking the necessary steps to be safer.
Solve360: CRM and Project Management
January 6, 2011
We have been using Solve360 for a few months now. This is a “software as a service” tool for managing both contacts and projects. It is tightly couple with Google Apps, so you can log in from there. That was an important feature in our initial evaluation, along with the consolidation in one place of all contacts, and the projects that involve them.
The contact information is easy to enter, and custom fields can be added to tailor the various forms as needed. It is easy to add documents, notes, task lists, and events to any contact.
The same can be done with projects, which are called “project blogs” in Solve360. They are collections of various materials, comments and documents, but they are not really hierchical collections of tasks. This is in part what led us to try other project management tools.
Things we did’t like
- Save is implicit when moving off the field – but we have both created empty stuff by mistake at times.
- The absence of Save / cancel buttons
- Screen layout isn’t remembered: when you change the column layout or width, and then go back in later, it goes back to default position
- We hate the term project “BLOG”
- Colors – can’t be changed or added to
- Flexible tags à la WordPress: can be implemented by adding a custom text field but that still doesn’t give you tag management (list of tags in use, delete tag, add tag)
- Can’t link a Solve 360 contact to a To Do item
- Only the administrator can create categories, and only one administrator is allowed at a time. Solve360 has said that this is deliberate so that category changes are forced to be organized and consistent by going through one person, but in practice it is a pain.
- Can’t enter a time for an activity – you can only pick to the nearest half hour.
- The iPhone app starts with a blank screen. You have to start typing a name to get a result. And it is sorted by first name for people.
Things we liked
- Custom fields – website, dropdown lists, muti-selection checkboxes. And custom fields are available for any searches
- The Solve360 contact form pops up when doing contacts in Google Apps online
- Type in the company a person works for and the company is created in Solve 360.
- Nice internal links of contacts, projects, companies
Website: http://norada.com/
Cost: $39/month for 3 users
Facebook User Names
October 5, 2010
You can create a URL-friendly user name for your Facebook page, but what about the pages you administer? Because we always seem to forget how to do it, here are the steps:
1. Login to Facebook and go to www.facebook.com/username.
2. Click on the link that says “Set a username for your Pages”, as shown below:
3. You should see a list of pages that you administer. Select the one you want to name. As long as the page has 25 fans or more, you can try a name and check on its availability. Periods are used as separators in names, but it doesn’t matter if you enter them here or not. For example, with the page names it.stuff.np, i.t.stuff.np, itstuffnp: just pick the format you prefer for your name. All three spellings will go to the same place.
Importance of Facebook
October 4, 2010
This is how some people actually view Facebook. I think we’ve all heard it. “Facebook is just a complete time suck! Its a complete waste of time.” Well, I suppose if you aren’t focused on a mission, it could be just that. I admit, when I first got on to Facebook, there was an addictive quality. I was looking-up folks I hadn’t seen in years but that’s just me. I’m a very social person. I was curious about what ever happened to that girl from kindergarten who, at that time, was my best friend in the whole world. What was her name? Read the rest of this entry »
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