July 1st, 2008 Brian Herzog
I know I’m a couple months late to the party, but this past weekend I upgraded this blog to Wordpress 2.5.1 (I upgraded the library’s blog, too, but more on that in a minute).
Upgrading SwissArmyLibrarian.net
The upgrade went fairly smoothly, and I think this website is operating normally. If you seen anything different or wrong, please let me know in the comments.
A few backend issues still need to be dealt with. For some reason, the comment admin screen is not displaying comments. If I search for them, they appear, but when I click the Show All Comments I get a “No results found” message. Odd. And, I’m having trouble with the ftp settings. Which should be fairly straight-forward, so I’ll keep trying.
Beyond these issues, I’m also still getting used to the new look and design of the admin interface. I’d heard it was very different (and not necessarily better), so I was prepared. Even with accounting for bias, I do think I like the old version better, but we’ll see.
The upgrade itself went smoothly. Wordpress makes is pretty easy, with their upgrade instructions. It really was as easy as the directions indicate, despite me making a few mistakes along the way (hurray for backups).
Upgrading ChelmsfordLibrary.org/blog
However, I must say that it was not as easy as upgrading my library’s blog. Our website is hosted at Bluehost.com, which offers many web services and programs pre-installed through Fantastico. I know Fantastico has some issue, but it sure does make upgrades like this easier. What took me a few hours to do on my own for swissarmylibrarian.net took perhaps ten minutes through Bluehost (and I didn’t see the problem with comments and ftp settings).
I don’t want make a sales pitch for them, but if a library is looking for a place to host their website, we’ve been very happy. It’s cheap (something like $7 a month), their tech support has been great, and so much software comes preinstalled that it’s easy to manage and try out new web tools without having to do all the installations yourself.
But if you are a library looking for web hosting, definitely check out LISHost.org. They specialize in hosting library websites, offer a lot of the extras, and will also help design a website.
Tags: 2.5, 2.5.1, bluehost, host, hosting, libraries, Library, lishost, public, upgrade, upgrading, web, web hosting, website, wordpress See Also
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February 26th, 2008 Brian Herzog
For the first official Swiss Army Librarian post, I wanted to mention a few things about my new home.
I upgraded from Wordpress v2.0.1 (which is what herzogbr.net/blog ran) to v2.3.3, and a lot had changed - but happily, most of the changes were for the better. The major outward change is the new theme, but my real goal was to update my code. Now, it’s all css-based, and the only code that doesn’t validate properly is the flickr badge.
It took a lot of behind-the-scenes fiddling to make this transition happen (Chris, my thank you gift on the way). On my About page I list all the plugins I’m using, and a few other technical details. I also fully explain “why Swiss Army Librarian?,” in two parts, but I’ll just summarize here:
- I’ve had a Swiss Army knife ever since college, and I use it all the time. Most people who know me couldn’t image me without it
- If I had to summarize the job responsibilities of a librarian, “swiss army knife” comes pretty close. We’ve got to be ready to handle any request that comes along, and be prepared with whatever tool is needed for the job at hand
During the migration, I found I really enjoyed playing with Wordpress plugins and pages. It has gotten me excited to start seriously using Wordpress as a CMS for a full website, and not just a blog. My library is looking to update the way we manage our website, so I’m going to be pushing and pulling Wordpress to see what it can do.
Alright, that’s that. I’d appreciate hearing what people think of the new look, and if you have any tips or tricks on using Wordpress as a CMS. And now, back to the regularly scheduled postings…
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December 18th, 2007 Brian Herzog
You know how you mean to do something, and know you should do it, but you never get around to it? Well, that’s me with learning Drupal.
But my friend Kyle (that’s Kyle, in the hat) isn’t a slouch like me. He actually went out and bough a Drupal book to learn from (while I, on the other hand, sit about twenty feet away from one every day, but have yet to crack it).
Anyway: my library uses Adobe Dreamweaver to manage our website. But dealing with static html pages is cumbersome, and stands as a large barrier to getting more staff contributing (easily) to our website. So, using a tool like Drupal would be a great improvement - not just for site management, but also in usefulness for our patrons.
I’m getting there. I’m also looking at expanding our Wordpress installation, from running just our blog to containing our entire website. Or, we could use Joomla. Or Scriblio. Or Plinkit. Part of the problem is the myriad of tools to choose from.
And Kyle’s no help. He writes:
One thing that I have been looking into for one of my clients is Omeka (http://omeka.org/). Omeka is a wiki/cms solution for museums and libraries to catalog information in an online format. It is being developed at George Mason University specifically for historical institutions.
Another tool. But from what I can tell (using it is invitation only, at the moment), it is neat, and they’ve got some interesting sites running it. I’m going to watch it and see where it goes.
I know I’ve been talking about these CMS tools for awhile, but perhaps that’s what new year’s resolutions are for. We will migrate the website to a new platform by the end of 2008. Ah, we’ll see.
Oh, and one more thing: I recently read that there’s a new drupal4lib group. Maybe with a support group, it’ll actually happen.
cms, drupal, drupal4lib, joomla, kyle, libraries, library, omeka, public, scriblio, wordpress
Tags: cms, drupal, drupal4lib, joomla, kyle, libraries, Library, omeka, public, scriblio, wordpress See Also
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September 22nd, 2007 Brian Herzog
Since there were plenty of posts about International Talk Like a Pirate day this week (which was Wednesday, 9/19), I avoided talking about it. However, this week’s reference question concerns it.
A patron came up to me on Wednesday and asked:
Patron: Why are people talking like pirates today?
Me: Today is “International Talk Like a Pirate Day.”
Patron: Yeah, but I mean, why today? Why September 19th? Did a famous pirate die on this day or something?
Well, huh. That I didn’t know.
So, I first grabbed our Chase’s Calendar of Events, which we keep at the desk for ready-reference. We looked up September 19th, but unfortunately, the description of “International Talk Like a Pirate Day” did not explain the choice of date. It did, however, list contact details for more information on the day, including the web address www.talklikeapirate.com.
We went to the website, and in the FAQ we found an answer: 9/19 is “Cap’n Slappy’s ex-wife’s birthday.”
The patron wasn’t really interested in who Cap’n Slappy was, and took this answer as “good enough.”
Later in the day I wanted to go back to this website to check something else, but accidentally mis-typed the url as www.talklikeapirateday.com. I don’t know if there is a connection between the two websites, but this one also had a similar history: “Founded by John Baur and Mark Summers during a raquetball game and, coincidentally, occuring the same day’s as Mark’s ex-wife’s birthday.” (So I guess that tells us who “Cap’n Slappy” is.)
While looking through this second website, I realized that I really liked it - it is one of the best examples I’ve seen of a website using the power of Wordpress as a content management system. It had blog posts, pages with content, an integrated wiki, a flickr badge - all the trimmings (even a pirate-speak translator). And the design was simple but interesting. Very nice.
If you’re interested in such things, I would highly suggest checking out this website. It’s a great example of what can be done, as an alternative to flat html files. Plus, the examples of pirate-speak are much better than most of what I heard on Wednesday.
libraries, library, pirate, pirates, public libraries, public library, reference question, reference question of the week, talk like a pirate, talk like a pirate day, wordpress
Tags: libraries, Library, pirate, pirates, public libraries, public library, Reference Question, reference question of the week, talk like a pirate, talk like a pirate day, wordpress See Also
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March 22nd, 2007 Brian Herzog
I spent the morning with a small group of Massachusetts librarians learning about how to use a blog or wiki to communicate better amongst library staff. We were graciously hosted by Andrea Mercado, of the Reading Public Library, who is currently developing both a wiki for her library’s intranet and a blog for her reference desk’s internal use (to replace the spiral notebook).
(and although Andrea is the Reference and Techie Librarian at Reading, this is also the same Andrea that maintains the PLA’s blog, blogs at LlibraryTechtonics.info, and has good taste in clothing.)
After a tour of the library, which I really liked (see photos on their flickr account), we got down to business. And again, note that we’re talking about tools for staff-only use - using wikis and blogs for patron tools is a topic for another time.
Reference Desk Blog
Andrea first talked about the hows and whys of using a blog as the start page for reference desk computers (it is searchable, everyone can contribute, easy way to organize information, keep other shifts up to day on projects and questions, etc.). She also talked about what blog software to use - she favors WordPress (which also powers my blog as well as my library’s), but warned that it may be too powerful (too complex/confusing) for some new users. Others, such as blogger or livejournal are also possible, free, and easier in that you don’t have to worry about installation or hosting, but really just won’t offer the kind of features and customization that a hosted blog like WordPress can provide.
Wiki As Intranet
We then moved on to wikis, which spent most of our time talking about. Andrea is running an installation of MediaWiki, and she loves it. The goal of this is to make it easier for staff to find (and contribute to) library policies, desk procedures, original files of handouts and presentations, library logos to put on new documents, staff and emergency phone numbers, etc. All of the things that might be laying around in binders or uncategorized on network servers, she wants to centralize and make findable through the wiki.
This seems like a great application for a wiki - the only catch is setting it up so that it does function as an intranet, rather being open to the entire world. Also, again she cautioned us to match the tool to the audience - MediaWiki is very powerful, but another program like pbwiki or Wetpaint might be simpler and more suitable for less technical users.
The meeting was also attened by two libriaians from the Memorial Hall Library in Andover. They’ve already begun using a wiki for local information, which they called Andover Answers. It is open for patrons to view, but it not currently editable by anyone but MHL librarians. However, they are cleverly using the “discussions” tab at the top of the screen to allow patrons (or anyone) to suggest changes for pages. These suggestions are viewable by everyone, and open for discussion, and then a librarian can research the suggestion and decide whether or not to make the change.
I thought this was a great idea, as so many people are still uncomfortable with the idea of letting non-librarians edit the information. We’re going through something similar with our community information database, and it might be a happy medium.
andover answers, andrea mercado, blog, blogs, libraries, library, mediawiki, memorial hall library, pbwiki, public libraries, public library, reading public library, wiki, wikis, wordpress
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