hi – 27nov07

Hi. I used to start quite a large number of these posts this way, but I haven’t lately. This is just a little heads up about a few things that you might be interested in.

  • I’m adding a little holiday sidebar with a few links to things you can get your favorite librarian. I’ve seen a few things where I’ve been like “Oh, isn’t that clever/appropriate?” so I figured I’d add them. The woodblock link is to a MetaFilter buddy who makes and sells amazingly lovely woodblock prints and has a little “help me advertise” program that I figured I’d help with. If you have other links, to your own stuff or great stuff from others, add it to the comments and I’ll put it up. I’ll take the sidebar down after the holidays. Please don’t get me anything, I have all that I need.
  • I may not have mentioned it here, but I took the Vermont Library Association website and ported it over to a bloggish format using WordPress and a few choice plugins that do things like put the jobs on their own page withough putting them on the front page, and allow people to add posts that are also events on the sidebar. I’d love to say that it went off without a hitch but the process was a little bumpy, mostly because of difficulty figuring out who had passwords to which pieces of the site. Folks, make sure you get this stuff in your binders! The switch from having one webmaster to making groups more responsible for their own content is a challenge as well. I’m lucky to be supported strongly by the VLA president as well as Judah Hamer from my former library who does the diplomacy stuff while I do the coding stuff.
  • I’ll be speaking at a conference in Dubai at the end of next week which I am very excited about. My friend Step who you may know from her various blogs is working at Zayed University and I am speaking at their conference and then Step and I are leading a blogging/wiki workshop. It will be the first time I’ve been out of the country to a non-English speaking locale (I know many people speak English, but not compared to Australia or Canada) in years. I am making an assumption that there are not many librarian.net readers in Dubai, but if anyone is, please look me up.

hi – 13apr

Hi. I spent an awful lot of time on the phone or on Skype today, most of it making things with other folks. In order

– Chitchatting with Casey about his Library Technology Report in which I write a chapter on Open Source Software Tools for libraries. We messed about with formatting and structure, laughed about how “Web site” is spelled in formal publications compared to everywhere else on the planet, and admitted the whole thing looks pretty good. Keep an eye peeled for it.
– Talked to Jay Datema from Library Journal and Bookism along with Peter Brantley for a podcast about all sorts of things. Specifically we discussed the nature of library content and social content becoming digital and the ramifications for archivists, librarians and plain old lovers of books.
– Did my weekly podcast with Matt Haughey from MetaFilter. This is always a fun weeks-end summary of what we’ve noticed on the site including my favorite posts from Ask MetaFilter

Then I swam. Then it was nighttime. I decided to take the train to CiL so that I can swing by and say hi to some friends in NY on the way. I have books and a few little snacks to bring with me. I’ll be in the CiL area from about Sunday night late til Tuesday afternoon/evening so please say howdy if you see me around. My talk is Monday. As with most of these quickie conferences, all my mealtimes are spoken for, but I still have some discretionary walking around time, depending on when I wake up. On the way back I’ll be stopping to see friends in Baltimore and then going to give a talk in Dodge City Kansas. People laugh when I say Kansas for some reason but I had such a good time there last time and finally got a good answer to my “please explain this Second Life and Libraries thing” question from some Kansas librarians.

So, I will be on the road for a while. Then I am coming back to teach an eBay class, some more digital pictures classes, maybe help one of the small libraries I work with install an actual OPAC instead of their in-library PAC and preparing a few more local talks in the next few weeks. I may not have mentioned this previusly, but I’m contributing occasionally (well, once so far) to the Slow Library website, so if you were waiting for it to come back from dormancy, that time has arrived.

hi – 03jan07

Hi — I’m pretty sure I’m finished with the redesign/retheming of librarian.net. The RSS feed will look a little different, but not much. The site looks cleaner and easier to use in my opinion. If you notice something missing or not working please let me know. If you do read the site only through RSS, you might want to stop by the place and take a look.

I just did a small retrospective at my personal blog about my last ten years of blogging. Yeah you read that right. I started jessamyn.com/journal (rss) January first 1997, in what feels now like a totally different life. I was out of library school but hadn’t been working as a librarian anyplace outside of the University of Washington. For a long time, my main web presence was at jessamyn.com and that didn’t change until the last three or four years. Now I’ve got four or maybe five little subsites spread all over the com/info/net universe and my work time is split between fixing little computers in little libraries and managing a large online community with a popular question answering site.

I’ll do a little “my library year in review” post this week, but I just wanted to note this little milestone here as well.

hi – 29aug

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.