Exercise 5 - RSS feeds

I hadn't really ever thought about that blinking orange button at the top of my web browser. Once in awhile, in a fleeting moment, I would wonder what it was. But then something flashy would distract me and I'd forget all about it. So imagine my surprise when I learned that Exercise 5 was about these orange things and that they're called RSS feeds.

About a week ago, I looked around at all of my favorite sites in anticipation of seeing that orange button light up. But alas, no luck. So I went to some other sites I like, such as www.ew.com, and added them to my feeds list. I also added "Imogen Heap News" and "Netflix Top 10" just for fun.

Unfortunately, I would check my feeds every day, and it didn't seem like there were that many updates. Ew.com had some, but that's about it. I don't think I'll be using this option again any time soon.

Exercise 4 - Play Day (Pandora)

I went to Pandora.com today to explore what it's all about. I was really excited about this one from the get-go because I'm such a music buff!

First of all, what a cool website! I set up my account and tried typing in "John Mayer" to see what it would do. It started me off with a John Mayer song then moved on to similiar artists, such as Maroon 5. So then I created 2 more stations: one with Imogen Heap and one with Coldplay. I liked that it let me say yay or boo to a song. If I said boo, like I did with the Dave Matthews song (I hate Dave Matthews!), it told me it would never play the song again. You can choose to retire a song for a month if it's been played too much lately. You can also click Quick Mix and it'll shuffle all of your stations for you. Then I went ahead and invited some friends to check it out.

I love this site!

Exercise 4 - Play Day (Image Generators)

Today was all about image generators. Seeing as I'm such a bakery nut, it was natural that I gravitated toward the cookie generator first. Above is the product of my exploration.

I also liked the post it note generator:

Some of the sites were really fun, but some that I was really interested in, like the mosaic generator, were defunct. :(

All in all, this was a fun exercise.