I am a huge fan of food blogs and have filled my del.icio.us links will all sorts of recipes found on great blogs. Well now, you don’t have to fill your linkrolls, bookmarks or RSS feed reader with posts from food blogs like I do because you can just go ahead and search 1900 food blogs in one place!
Let me know what mouthwatering recipes I’ve missed!
Tasmin Little is offering a free download of her violin CD. Her hope is to bring classical music to a new generation and to people who otherwise don’t tend to listen to violin. The download features composers J.S. Bach, Paul Patterson and Eugene Ysaye.
The download process can be a bit confusing because she offers several options. Most folks will want the mp3 format and why not go with the 320Kbps if you have the space. Enjoy!
What a nice thing to feature on your library site! Free and legal downloadable music that everyone can enjoy!
Oo la la! I adore the beta Lookybook site so much that I am posting about it on both of my blogs, something I almost never do! The site offers all sorts of picture books that you can page through online! They are top-of-the-line and recent books. The paging works seamlessly and smoothly with an intuitive interface, and you can embed the Lookybooks onto your blog or website, even without registering for the site.
Registration gets you your own bookshelf, the ability to comment on books, and other bells and whistles.
You can browse the books by highest rated and most looked at. Here is an embedded book so you can see how it works:
I can see this really jazzing up online bibliographies of picture books, or just allowing you to highlight a particular author. Think of the possibilities on your website!
For months and months now, I have been using ScribeFire to post to my myriad of blogs, both internal and external, Moveable Type and Drupal alike. But today, today I may have just discovered the next tool I will use to write my blog posts. Today I am trying out Windows Live Writer and I am completely amazed by its feel.
First, the writer emulates the look and feel of my blogs. Their templates are here around me as I type, the fonts stay close to the same and the spacing as well.
Second, inserting pictures, tables, maps, tags, video, and links is amazingly simple.
Saving as a draft is not only easy but inviting. Publishing at a later date is more than an afterthought. Splitting your post is simple, I can play endlessly with fonts and colors, etc.
Alright, so some of it isn’t as nice as my good old ScribeFire. The Drupal blogs don’t want to play nicely with this Microsoft product. The template for one of my blogs isn’t the right one on the writing area, and that is a bit distracting.
So right now I am torn. I’ll have to keep on playing with this to see if my Drupal blogs will ever happily work. But I am optimistic that there are great blog writers coming. Even if this one isn’t the one for me, it may be the one you are looking for.
LinkBunch is a service that lets you group together a collection of links into a single link that you can share via IM, email, mobile phone, and other services. Just put the links in the box on the site, click Bunch, and there you have your new small link. Handy dandy way to share a collection of items!
I’m posting this right now to our library blog. We have to fight news with news:
When asked about whether he was nervous about Amazon’s new ebook reader, Kindle, Steve Jobs replied: “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is,” he told John
Markoff of The Times, “the fact is that people don’t read anymore.
Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last
year.”
It’s enough to make a librarian weep. But wait! Here comes a wonderful article from the New York Times offering alternative statistics:
Last year, a survey for the Associated Press found that a much smaller
number — 27 percent — had not read a book lately, which means nearly
three-in-four have read a book…. The more compelling statistic was rarely mentioned in news accounts of the A.P. story: the survey found that another 27 percent of Americans had read 15 or more books a year. That report documents a national celebration.
Love jazz? Then My Jazz Network may be the social networking site for you where you can connect with other jazz lovers, listen to audio, watch videos, and even create your own channel of favorite clips.
Oh boy, this could be ba-ad…
Feed Crier allows you to take any RSS feed and receive it via Instant Messenger rather than an aggregator! Sweet! Now caution people, I would not recommend adding any of the big blogs to this. You really don’t want your IM flashing or beeping for every Boing Boing or Slashdot post. But think of those blogs that update occasionally and that you want to be right on top of. I have a list of those, but I too will try to be cautious and only start with ten or so. 
GovBenefits.gov is the official benefit site for the federal government. It offers information on federal and state benefits, easily browsed by using a list that breaks the benefits into categories. The site has information on over 1,000 programs. If you are unsure which benefits you may qualify for, click on the Benefits tab at the top and take their questionnaire. The site is available in English and Spanish.
I am doing a dance of Vista joy right now! My favorite little application has finally come to Vista! Hott Notes is a program that lets you put post-it notes on your desktop as reminders. Much more visual and in-your-face than either Outlook notes or the little applet that comes with Vista, Hott Notes also offers different colors, the ability to make the notes bigger, change fonts, add timers, and much more. Definitely worth the download for anyone running Vista. And if you are running 2000 or XP, it happily works on those as well.
