Tour-tastic

I'll admit, I'm not totally tech illiterate, but I'm not completely up to date with the different types of technologies that continually emerge. Usually I tend to bookmark every single site I find compelling the moment I stumble on it, leaving me with loads of unsorted links that are frustrating to sort through. Sure, I do make folders to segregate them according to topics, but I like to have a visual because it's easier to remember things when I see them. My writing class comes in handy in this instance, we learn about a different service and some new web service every week.

Most recently, we've signed up for Pageflakes, which collects various links and allows users to arrange them to their liking on their respective pages. It's almost like a visual version of Diigo and Bloglines combined. Since this blog is about travel, and traveling as a student with a limited budget, you can guess what my Pageflake looks like. It has two columns to house my RSS feeds on the left, and annotated bibliography on the right.

RSS Feeds

In this column I've got a spattering of nifty widgets that keep me up to date on feeds that I usually check out at Bloglines. Only, this is narrowed down to feeds that solely pertain to travel. I've listed my social bookmarking soulmate's (jeanoid on del.ic.ious) bookmarks, as well as my own for reference. The neat thing about these widgets is that they're refreshable, so the content can be updated at any time. I have a feed to my own blog in the left column as well, which is helpful because I spend most of my time looking at the post window (and writing in here) that I forget what my blog looks like from a reader's point of view. I think it makes me pay more attention to certain entries when I view it outside of the editing "room."

Annotated Bibliography

Thanks to MIT and their awesome creation, Citeline, I can create bibliographies without having to hunt for all of the publishing information or do any typing! Actually, I have to include that last bit myself, seeing as this is an annotated bibliography and all. Check out the notes I've left for each of the sources I've found, I've got to spruce them up a bit, and make them a little more coherent, but they'll do for now.

Searching....searching....got it!

On the right hand side of my Pageflakes page, I also have several search windows, two for news and two for blogs. I've tested "travel" and "expat" as search subjects, but nothing that comes up has grabbed my interest yet. I'm still practicing my search tactics! Just above that I have a mini Google search, which I think it pretty nifty. It looks just like the Google web page, but it fits right into the little package of a flake! It's just as helpful (or not, depending on how successful I've deemed it) as the four little search engines below it.