librarian.net » wordpress

a few late summer links

jessamyn — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:56:37 +0000

I’ve been scooting around a little bit lately and here are some things that have been crossing my virtual desk. I’ve also dealt with two wordpress issues [a hack! and an outdated sidebar navigation element] and I’ve upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. If you’re on a Summer schedule, I’d suggest upgrading before things get hectic.

A small and to the point help save our library blog from the William Leonard Public Library in Robbins Illinois. More about their library’s financial crisis.
Ralph has some space for a new library at the Canadian Aerospace Warfare Center and no idea how to do it. He’s built a little wiki. maybe people have advice?
Bernie Margolis, now the State Librarian of NY after leading Boston Public Library for a long time, is quoted in a library Journal article saying that ALA and its allies should be stepping up to demand more library access for the scanned books that will be made available via the Google Books Settlement, if and when that happens.
LSW fundraiser for the LFPL, one week left. Don’t know what those acronyms are? Click the link!

Website 2.0 – why a cms is in your future

jessamyn — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 20:18:51 +0000

I spent Friday at the NELA-ITS CMS Day. I gave the keynote in the morning, just talking about what CMSes are and why they’re useful with a little overview of a few, and then hung out to see other librarians talk about how they’re using their CMSes. It was a great day. We had a wonderful, if chilly, room at the lovely Portsmouth Public Library and I learned a lot about how some New England area libraries are running their library websites with Drupal, Joomla, Plone and WordPress.

Having the actual people behind these websites talking about what worked and what didn’t work — and people were very candid about what was good and bad about these CMSes — made for a fascinating day of show and tell. Add to this the fact that all the software demonstrated was free and open source and I really think we sent people away with some great ideas on how to save money and still deliver good web content. Not having the chilling effect of a vendor’s stink-eye [or lawsuit threat] was also delightful. I’m now done with public speaking stuff until October I believe. Glad to end this season on such an up note. Thanks to NELA-ITS and Brian Herzog for coming up with the idea in the first place. Notes for my talks — links to slides and a page of links to what i was talking about, are here: Website 2.0! why there is a CMS in your future. Thanks to everyone for showing up. Here are the links to other people’s presentations and websites.

MyKLOW gets websites to libraries that need them

jessamyn — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 02:59:14 +0000

“The My Kansas Library on the Web project is an attempt to allow small public libraries across the state have access to high end web-based tools to facilitate easy web development.

Translation: It’s a way to make your library’s website all that it can be and more by giving you easy to use tools that are accessible from ANYWHERE there is an Internet connection.” Smart project and attractive and easy-to-use site from the Kansas Regional Library Systems and the State Library of Kansas.

WordPress 2.6 open for business

jessamyn — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 16:40:36 +0000

Hi — I just upgraded my WordPress install and along with it, removed some old crusty plugins that I don’t think I was using anymore. If you come across something that is broken or working worse than it was this morning, please drop me a line or a comment and let me know. Thank you.

woodshedding in libraryland

jessamyn — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 17:01:17 +0000

Summertime is the time I usually have off from travel and even from a lot of local library work. While I’m waiting for one of the teeny libraries I work with to give me a contract — helping with automation and ILL, check me out a real librarian — I’ve been doing a lot of reading and that thing we call “keeping current.” I will spare you the sad story of my recent hard drive crash, but suffice to say that recreating my digital life from scratch is TONS easier than it would have been a few years ago. That said, it’s not easy. I realized at some point that when I talk about woodshedding, people don’t always know what I mean so I will point you to the Urban Dictionary definition. That’s me, minus the weed and the banjo.

I think it’s hard, in our profession to both do our jobs and learn about doing our jobs. Unlike many jobs I’ve had — tech support being a notable one — working at a library is not always a great way to learn about working at a library. It’s a great way to learn to do your job, engage with your community and your content, and deliver the best services you can, but it’s not easy to meet other librarians, learn about the way they do their librarianing other places and share ideas. The web helps us with that. I think people like me who travel and tell stories about libraries in other places also help.

This is all just a long winded way of talking about WordPress, actually. Laura Crossett has put together a few little communities for librarians interested in learning about WordPress for libraries. While WP is blogging software, you can actually use it to simply run a small website. We use it for the Vermont Library Association and it’s allowed more members more access to content creation which I think has been very helpful. Here are the places she has created, if you’re WordPress curious, check them out.

WordPress for libraries wiki
WordPress for Libraries WebJunction group (still pretty nascent really)
WordPress for libraries Google group (requires google login)

Please consider checking them out and adding your knowledge, or experimenting with WordPress if you’re looking for a basic content management system or blogging tool for your library.

wordpress 2.5 upgrade complete

jessamyn — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 03:51:54 +0000

Hi. I’ve just updated to WordPress 2.5 and while I find the admin interface horrible, the web site seems to look okay. This upgrade fixes some pretty nasty vulnerabilities that the 2.3-ish version of WordPress had. Do yourself a favor and take the time to update. If you notice anything gone kablooey about the blog post-update, please leave a comment here or drop me an email. Thanks!

librarian.net is rocking wordpress 2.3

jessamyn — Fri, 05 Oct 2007 19:54:17 +0000

Hi. I upgraded to WordPress 2.3 today because I just noticed a bug in the tagging plug-in I was using which means that any time I approved a comment for a particular post, the tags associated with that post vanished. Pretty weird huh? WordPress 2.3 has native tag support which means no more wonky plugin/WP interactions. It also has — hidden in the manage > import > section — a tag importer that will either import your tags from popular tag plugins or import your categories as tags. This is all good news. I managed to do the entire thing in about 20 minutes including adding tags to my current template, adding the tag cloud, downloading new versions of a few other plug-ins, and re-doing the little hacks I always make to my WordPress install including a custom stylesheet, removal of all the extra cruft from the dashboard, and pulling in a del.icio.us feed of the “addme” tag into my now blank dashboard area. Here are a few links that were helpful to me in doing this upgrade

see it’s in the URL

jessamyn — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 00:41:01 +0000

I changed my permalink structure a bit here. URLs to individual posts now contain the post number and the post title. They will also work with just the post number, so old URLs will work fine. I’m expecting it to function with no problems at all, but I’ve been wrong before. If you notice anything squirrely, put a note in the comments or email me. Thanks.

a few from the mailbag

jessamyn — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 22:54:01 +0000

There has been a definite drop-of fin email since I decided to get rid of the mailform and just post my email address which is a definite shame. However, I don’t get a lot of mail, so having to wade through hundreds of spam emails per day just to read a note or two was not worth my while. In any case, people still send me inteersting stuff, here is a sampling of what I’ve liked recently.

The Monster Librarian – a reader’s advisory site for horror fiction readers. I especially enjoyed the Genre Reader’s Bill of Rights.
AskMeNow – supposed to be “your mobile lifestyle network” it’s a fee-based ($0.25) IM readyref service you can access from your phone. Check out their editorial policies.
Bryan pointed me towards this great WordPress comment spam reducer. You may have noticed a painfully simple comment challenge where you have to answer the question “what color is red?” If you get it right, you can leave a comment. It’s done wonders for the maintenance time I spend here.
Paul sent along this great little bookplate from this awesome book blog. Paul has his own awesome book blog.
Josh from LibLime — remember them, they do install.support of Koha — write to tellme they have an RSS feed for their news page and alerting me to their new fancy Koha ZOOM ILS. It’s very Googly, try it out at Nelsonville Public Library.

another wordpress update

jessamyn — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 13:48:07 +0000

I seem to have found a comment form that works; thanks to everyone for their advice and suggestions. I have also used a slightly modified version of the sociable plugin to add tiny links beneath each post so that you can socially bookmark any of them via del.icio.us, digg or co.mments. Sociable supports a lot of social bookmarking services, but in the interests of keeping the icon-noise level down, I started with the three that I use. Are there other sites that are listed on the Sociable page that you use often? As always, you can track when I’m using for my WordPress install on the wordpress mods page.

hi – 29aug

jessamyn — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 12:54:44 +0000

Hi. Thanks for bearing with me during my protracted WordPress upgrade. What’s that you say? You hardly noticed? That must because a) the WP upgrade process is pretty darned easy if you can read a recipe and b) I am becoming a l337 WP h@XX0r. Not like I can build my own plugins, but I can noodle my way around all the WP files and CSS with ease. For reference, the latest WordPress version is 2.0.4. Check to make sure you’re using it, and upgrade all your plugins while you’re at it. You can take a look at my wordpress mods page to see what plugins I’m using. Feel free to let me know if anything’s not quite working right, I tried to put it all back together correctly.

information need: mailto form for wordpress

jessamyn — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 16:15:31 +0000

A lot of housecleaning going on this weekend. I need a better contact form for this website. WordPress folks, what are you using? Is it mostly spamfree? Was it easy enough to install and administer? I’m looking for something ideally where I could customize it to work with my theme, add a custom subject line, and not much else. More info, slightly on the Flickr page.

hi – 15aug

jessamyn — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 21:46:59 +0000

Hi. I had been getting a lot of spam through my contact form and I’ve switched to the Contact Form ][ plug-in. If you notice any weirdness trying to get ahold of me, please try to get me on chat, or myfirstname at gmail always works as well.

a handsome and familiar site for the library association of ireland

jessamyn — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 01:59:09 +0000

One of the things that is a little mysterious to people who are new to blogging is how people you mention on your blog seem to show up in your comments whenever their names come up. Simple, we use Technorati; in WordPress it’s even built into the dashboard of the software. In this fashion, I found the WordPress hosted blog for the Library Association of Ireland. Pretty lovely and professional looking site, don’t you think?

hi – 04feb

jessamyn — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 22:18:07 +0000

Hi. I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.0 which you probably didn’t even notice unless you spend a lot of time messing about with my tags which are ever so slightly broken. The upgrade was incredibly easy and WordPress 2.0 has a lot of nifty features in it like a theme viewer, some AJAX-y bits, and better user administration. I’ve also decided to really go to town and edit the stylesheet in the admin section so that I could avoid some of the logos, cruft, bad colors and dashboard “features.” Here are a few screenshots in Flickr:

If you’re really WordPress curious, I have a bloggish page that outlines the modifications I’ve made to WordPress to make it work the way I want it to work.