Wired Wednesday: Cat Photos

By: Deirdre Costello, Associate Platform Manager

I’m still working on hunting down the project I had in mind when I mentioned Emily Dickinson in last week’s Wired Wednesday on book technologies, so I thought I’d write about something a little different this week.

I know that not all librarians love cats. There are a lot of stereotypes about librarians that I’ve never seen embodied, not once. However, someone I admire in the LIS field once told me to show up to job interviews with cat hair on my clothes and then apologize for it; he said it would never fail, and I admit I’ve met some interviewers that this would indeed have an effect on.

So sometimes in this field when you want to make an impact, share a heartwarming moment or even just brighten your own day, you need a novel source of cat content. Here are some of our favorites we hope you’ll find a use for.

• CatPaint: probably the most impressive .99 I’ve ever spent. When I want to show off my iPhone to someone who’s hard to impress, it’s either this or Ocarina. The lasers, which are a relatively new addition, consistently knock socks off.
• placekitten: Exactly what it sounds like. High-quality kitten images to use as placeholders in your designs or code.
• CatBlock: You may have heard of AdBlock, the Chrome extension that erases all the ads from your browsing experience. For April Fool’s Day 2012, the maker of AdBlock turned it into CatBlock, which replaced all those ads with pictures of cats. This turned out to be so popular that he’s turned it into a subscription service!