Task 13 - Personal productivitiy tools

Now these are some products I can get behind!  I remember reading about Backpack when it was first coming out.  I think services like that; things that handle many different kinds of calendars, tasks, to do lists, budgets, etc. are incredible.  Many of these sites 23 things has us look at (My Yahoo, iGoogle) make use of widgets.  Widgets are part of why a website I recently designed uses Wordpress.  I can find a Wordpress widget for pretty much anything I want to do.  And I don't have to speak code.  And widgets look neat.  And do cool stuff.  :)

I remember when some people who shall remain nameless weren't supposed to go to gmail and check their email while at work.  However, they all just set up iGoogle pages and set their email up as one of the little widgets and presto - they'd worked around the block.  (p.s. this is what every high school kid in the world does with school - and probably library - internet filters.  They work around.  They aren't dumb.)

Again, I seem stuck in rut of believeing these sites would mostly be helpful for staff, but not so much for the public at large.  However, you could set up a really library centric customized iGoogle page or the like and have it be the homepage for each public computer (maybe?).  It would be a neat way to organize important stuff and send people in whatever direction they need to go on the web.

The 23 Things blog mentions PDF creation software.  I use this ALL OF THE TIME to turn MS Publisher files into something everone else can read.  I also posted up some library policies in PDF form because, believe it or not, not everyone has Word so posting them up in an exclusively Microsoft Word accessible format seemed icky.  ANYWAY, I was really thrilled to find that the new MS Office 2007 products have a built in PDF creator.  Now if only my workplace was operating Office 2007...instead of Office 2000.  Ouch.

p.s.  I run Windows Vista on my home computer.  It has the cutest little desktop sidebar ever and it includes a tiny little yellow sticky note right there on the desktop that I can type on.  It makes me extraordinarily happy.  The only downside?  I never close my Firefox and Word windows, so I rarely to never see my desktop...oops!