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.
Cincinnati public library selling naming rights
For $100,000 you can name the spiral staircase in Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County’s new Big Beautiful Library whatever you want. Slightly more for the rare book room or the children’s room, within reason of course. Can’t find a mention of it on their web site. [digg]
Library board vice president Charles Lindberg wants to make sure that the naming be done tastefully: , “I can see ‘The Larry Flynt Children’s Room.’ I wouldn’t be very happy with that.”
information need: mailto form for wordpress
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.
AskMetaFilter makes it to ResearchBuzz
Usually my jobs are pretty separate, but it was cool to get a tip of the hat from Tara over at ResearchBuzz talking about AskMetaFilter as being a really useful QnA site.
I find of all the Ask-the sites out there I tend to prefer the Librarian/Reference type sites (it’s scary how many states now have Ask-A-Librarian services) and Ask Metafilter. AskMeFi because it tends to have interesting questions and thoughtful answers. (And occasionally, granted, whacked-out questions and lunatic answers.) Many of these sites also have archives of asked questions, making them fun to mine even when current questions aren’t interesting.
heroism and CSS
Even though library jobs don’t pay super-well and they’re not particularly high-status positions, the opportunity for heroism and just general fairy-godmother type actions are many. I’ve only been back in town for a few days but I already helped the head of the garden club get her mailing list online, helped a woman in town sell off her old books on tape (including pictures, on Ebay) helped a woman apply for US citizenship and get her own email account so she doesn’t have to share her husband’s any longer. I have one student I work with who learns one new email feature a session, and every time she comes in and we learn, say, how to forward mail, she’ll look up at me grinning and say “It’s just like magic, itsn’t it?”
The fun part for me is that most of this work is easy for me and yet solves a large problem for other people. The most fun part is often helping out bloggers, because when you get it right, they’re likely to say all sorts of nice things about you on the Internet.