Monday, October 12, 2009

Thing 12

So I'm over the halfway point in this technology journey. It definitely has been an adventure to explore all these different sites and tools - some useful personally and/or professionally, others just plain fun.

Thing 12 is creating my own personal search engine based on sites that I prefer to use. This reminds me somewhat of bookmarking sites (like Delicious) except that instead of just saving them to use later, you can actually search them. So I went to http://www.rollyo.com. It is possible to use this search engine with out creating your own.... and you can choose a category you want to search (gossip, tehcnology, parenting, health, etc....)

Creating a search roll is pretty painless. You name it, type in the URLs you want to be part of your roll (up to 25), select a category & add tags (if you want - these last two steps are completely optional) and BAM a search roll is born. I like that you don't HAVE to create an account to create a roll. However, after I created my roll, I realized I had neglected some sites and wanted to add them. I tried to click on the edit option, but it didn't work, so I thought if I registered for an account, I'd be able to edit my roll.

After I registered, I opted not to fill out the remainder of my profile, and then waited for the page to load.....several times Rollyo was slow to load, and I received page load errors a few times too. Even after I was registered and logged in, I still couldn't use the "edit search roll option" so I tried the dashboard - where I was able to add sites, but by this point I had forgotten some of the sites I wanted to add, and then once I clicked that Iwas done editing, the page again took forever to load. I closed the site, and then re-opened it to find that on the main search page there were 2 copies of my search roll. I clicked on dashboard to see what was going on. And then got another page load error. So, I'm giving up on Rollyo!

Perhaps this could be a very useful site and maybe it's just my computer.... but I'm frustrated so am ending my post on Thing 12 here. This does give me good perspective when assisting patrons who are encountering difficulties with technology.

12 down, 11 to go - over the halfway mark!

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