Thing 1 continued: Good (Net)Vibrations

After giving iGoogle a go and coming away distinctly underwhelmed, I thought, "Wouldn't it be Nice if there was a similar kind of platform, but one that provides a clearer, cleaner and more flexible interface?"

A more traditional dashboard than the
ones we're playing with
Photo: http://www.dragondriving.co.uk

It's not quite as intuitive to use, but with Netvibes there is no cluttered sidebar or slavish adherence to the promotion of Google products; instead the only tabs are user-created and line up along the top of the "dashboard" (which I'm rapidly realising is the web 2.0 buzzword - quite a departure from its original meaning, which was a barrier of wood or leather fixed at the front of a horse-drawn carriage or sleigh to protect the driver from mud which would literally dash itself against the board). The selection of widgets on offer is also much wider and generally more useful - as ever, you do have to be careful about the searchterms you use - the results for "blogger" were particularly interesting - but I found them much easier to manipulate, as you can choose how they display new material (headline, slideshow, news ticker) and my particular favourite was a 'link widget' which allows you to turn websites which may not have widgets into bookmarks on your dashboard, meaning that everything can be attached to the dashboard and will help break the habit of defaulting to my browser-based favourites.

Geeking out with language tools on Netvibes

I also played around with the tabs on Netvibes, creating a Travel tab (thanks for the idea Jenny), a Blogs tab for all my RSS feeds (I'm a complete newbie on this one but hopefully Thing 3 will clue me up), and a Languages tab for all the dictionaries and translators I usually use (iate.europa.eu and dict.leo.org are respectable, I request any serious linguists not to judge me for using WordReference though!) I do some freelance translation and proofreading, as well as being lucky enough to use my foreign languages regularly in the Classics library, so having all those tools at one glance will be incredibly useful. Not to mention that the strawberry theme will be Keepin' the Summer Alive all year round.

I haven't yet ventured out into the wide world of public pages, à la Annie, but I'm becoming increasingly comfortable with the new things I'm encountering, which bodes well for the rest of the programme, extending All Summer Long...