Weekly round up – week 9

Let’s get rid of the elephant first, this week I did a lot of tidying up as the tweetorial took over my blog. Twitter dominated and it was messy, I can’t have disorder or mess. You can now read all the tweets in one nice, neat post.

Adventuring through classmates’ blogs this week also gave me a couple of smiles, Claire and I have a TV show in common and Renee found a brilliant infographic which I stole. I also enjoyed some recommended readings which tied into an article I shared from my pocket.

Youtube fun was to be had with a video talking about algorithms in the financial sector and how they are causing physical changes to our world and there was excitement as I had a play with IFTTT to try to show the potential pitfalls of humans interpreting algorithmic data. Then disappointment as it didn’t work but still a valuable thought. I pinned a great picture of a digital footprint to talk about the information we harvest from students here at Edinburgh and how we might be using it and I joined Helen in celebrating our real lecture, like “proper” students 😉  which served nicely as a chance to challenge course design for all and not the assumption of a student.

This week has felt balanced and productive and  I feel I have progressed with some of my digital choices, learning their benefits, was that the point of making me use IFTTT perhaps and I had space to contemplate and to share thoughts. A successful week.

 

Tweet! IFTTT tools that we would recommend

I wondered if we each had a tool that we were brave enough to recommend to the rest of the class? We are all using twitter to its death but is there something else which you feel has worked particularly well with minimum fuss? Pinterest perhaps?

My take homes are that there are some tools which don’t quite manage and need a little bit of jiggery-pokery in the code to make it work visually – Instagram, for example, posts the images at 600px width. However with my theme, the column for content is only 550px wide so the images bleed into the text on the right-hand-side column,  so I change the width to 500px. Also pocket doesn’t always post the pic but instead of leaving it blank, adds an image not found – image which I find annoying.

I found today that youtube, which is native in wordpress (if you post the link it will embed),   doesn’t work when added through ITFFF, so again a little tweak in the code fixes that.

I am obsessive about my blog being easy to read and not look messy though so maybe it’s just me but I do believe as we are posting our blogs publically on the web, we are all responsible for adhering to WWW rules of accessibility where we can and so should be making an effort to ensure any internet user who wishes to enjoy our blog content can and is not restricted because they are not able bodied.