One year on.

Can't believe it but have been doing this for a year!

What I thought would be a pretty old school re-introduction to Fortran computing has turned into a fantastic kaleidoscope of programming, networking and cloud computing activities. Its not exactly been the structured journey originally planned but rather a meander around various avenues as and when I came across them.

One frightening realisation was that it didn't take long to get back into a Fortran 'flow' - very enjoyable - mathematical routines the lot. Which was a great re-starter! However, the most exciting part of the past year has been the introduction to new media for sharing and networking of 'knowledge'. The brilliant thing is that this part of the revival has cost absolutely nothing in terms of application costs. The biggest cost was in the time invested in development of the content and network. This however, is part of the attraction of course!

Quick summary of online things, including an estimate of the 'value' of each;

1. LinkedIn - essential, nuff said, 10/10
2. Storify - excellent repository and for thread building - 7/10
3. Scoop.it - very easy for collation of things - 7/10
4. Google+ - I like this as it connects me to all other G-things - 9/10
5. Google Sites - brilliant free web-site builder - free to anyone - 10/10
6. Google Reader - great collator of news feeds - 6/10
7. Google analytics - great for monitoring web-site activity - 6/10
8. Twitter - original thought that this would be rubbish but turned out to be fantastic for current news - 10/10
9. Tweetdeck - what a dashboard - 9/10
10. Trello - came out of the blue - project/activity manageent tool - now essential 9/10
11. Corkboard - the one that fell by the wayside - remined post it note site - 4/10
12. Blogger - withut which you wouldn't be reading this years worth of diary - 10/10
13. GitHub - code repository - essentail  - one with great potential for the future 8/10
14. Dropbox - absolutely brilliant - 10/10
15. Photobucket - saved me hours copying photo's between machines - 6/10

Wow - that a pretty exhaustive list but still only scratching the surface - you definitely need a 'strategy' for managing all this - otherwise burnout will ensue. In my view the trick is to have an 'approach' for each of these and on how they fit together - more of that in future posts.

With thanks to all - named in past posts - for pointing me in the direction of these new worlds!!