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Category: Blogs and Blogging

Comments: Terms of Service

Published by Iris on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007

I’ve been thinking about a blog post I ran across a while ago about laws that apply to bloggers, specifically point 7 on that list of 12 laws: Who owns user-developed content and can you delete it? This reminded me that comments people write here are their own, and that I may not have the right to delete them even if they’re threatening or offensive. According to the law, I need a “terms of service” in order to be able to delete any such content.

I have never received any such comments and I hope I never do, but just in case, here are my terms of service.

I reserve the right to delete any comment left on this blog if I think that the comment is inappropriate or harmful in any way.

I hope that I never have to exercise these rights.

4 Comments

Beating Rocks Together: Print Styles for Blogger

Published by Iris on Friday, May 18th, 2007

Long story short (ish)…

Walt liked a blog post but reminded me that I’ve never been able to figure out how to make blogger cough up a good style for printing posts.

I whined that I don’t know how to fix it.

Dorothea and Steve worked HARD to help me fix it.

Steve was the first to come up with an absolutely fantasta-brilliant solution, to which I added a little bit of nothingness to just so I could pretend to have participated in this effort, and which I now offer up to the blogger world. (Hint, if what I write makes no sense, check out my source code. It’s all there … Oh, and what I’m writing is not in “real” tech-speak, because I don’t speak that language very well. Also, Blogger “cleans up” tags in the body of posts and makes them invisible, so I sometimes have to describe tags rather than type them. Sorry. Blame Blogger.)

First, wrap all of your current style like this:

@media screen {[all styles go here]}

The opening curly bracket goes just above /* Defaults and the closing curly bracket goes just above ]]> and the closing b:skin tag, which I can’t type here because blogger WILL NOT leave it in the text.

Then, between your new closing curly bracket and the mysterious closing b:skin tag, put your print style, which looks like this (except that you bracket the style lines with “<" and ">” like regular HTML, which if I do here blogger “cleans up,” so I’ve left off the <> brackets):

[opening bracket here]style media="'print'" type="'text/css'"[closing bracket here]

body {
background: white;
font-size: 12pt;
font-family:Palatino,'Times New Roman',times,serif;
}
#sidebar {display:none;}
#bottom {display: none}
#footer {display: none}
#blog-pager-newer-link {display: none}
#blog-pager-older-link {display: none}
#blog-pager {display: none}
.feed-links {display: none}
.profile-datablock {display: none}
.profile-textblock {display: none}
.profile-data {display: none; }
.profile-img {display: none; }
.comment-footer {display: none; }
.description {display: none; }
.post-footer {display: none; }

[opening bracket here]/style[closing bracket here]

After this comes that mysterious b:skin tag, and then the closing header tag. And now things should print beautifully. Happy printing.

p.s. Wondering why I talk about beating rocks? Wonder no longer.

4 Comments
Blogging about Conference Blogging

Blogging about Conference Blogging

Published by Iris on Thursday, April 19th, 2007

I’m so bad at napping that I nearly always give up the struggle, even when I’m completely exhausted. So here I am blogging rather than napping. And speaking of blogging, I was sitting there at Steven Cohen’s presentation (or rather, on the stairs outside of the overflowing overflow room), taking notes and using my wireless connection to show people around me the stuff Steven was showing but that none of us could see (thank goodness for Google). Oh, and it was a good set of tools, even if Fleck does kick CiteBite’s butt, no matter what Steven says. :-P

In fact, it was probably the intimacy of sitting on the floor together, hovering over a couple of laptop monitors, and getting all jazzed up over fun technology that led one of the other women near me to come up afterwards and ask how I manage to blog sessions. She said she’d seen me typing away at an earlier session, and she sounded more than a little skeptical that anyone could possibly type and listen all at the same time. So I showed her my raw notes (especially URLs for slides or other interesting sites), how I highlight in bold any portion of those notes that I think will make good inclusions in a blog post, and how I add parenthetical comments to remind me what questions or ideas the sessions sparked. Then I showed her how I take the notes and create posts around them whenever I get a minute (and some working wireless, which got pretty rare as the conference progressed).

“But you’re still typing,” she protested, “which seems like it’d make it harder for you to listen to what’s being said.” Thinking back, I only gave her one third of the whole answer to that issue. I explained that I can type a lot faster than I can write long-hand, so I actually hear more of the session than I would if I were writing on paper. But I didn’t explain that typing with an eye to synthesizing for a blog post helps me stay on task when I’m listening to presentations (as Nichole just blogged… it’s another inadvertent-blog-topic-convergence day). It forces me to look for the themes and primary points in the presentations. I don’t end up blogging every session, but I do end up taking blog-ready notes for almost every session.

And of course there’s the final third of the puzzle. When presenters end up explaining something I already understand, I can compose the actual blog posts while I keep an ear out for when the presentation moves on to topics or perspectives that are newer to me. The fact that I only posted a couple of times a day during this conference speaks to the general lack of such down-times for me, which is a good thing. But it did happen occasionally.

In the end, the skeptical woman walked away looking relieved that I wasn’t wasting my conference registration fee (or hotel costs, which was significantly more expensive). Maybe next year she’ll have a blogger banner on her name tag. :)

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5 Library Heroes

Published by Iris on Friday, April 6th, 2007

I’ve been of several minds about posting this. I read a ton of amazing blogs by people I respect and admire. I know my aggregator’s feed count doesn’t compare with a lot of other people’s, but it’s more than enough to keep me busy, most days, and if you’re in my aggregator, you’re definitely one of my heroes. I’m pretty ruthless about weeding out feeds that I don’t actively look forward to viewing every morning before breakfast, every day when I get the chance, every evening after dinner, and every weekend. So my five blogs list is more about personal connections than about professional value (which is not to say that these have no professional value, of course).

So here they are in what I’d call chronological order:

  • Meredith Farkas: I met her by accident at CIL 2006 when we were both part of a group that famously defected from a dine around without realizing that this might cause our dine around host some difficulties with the restaurant. I had no idea who she was, but people were talking about her blog the same way my fellow English majors talked about Shakespeare. So when I got back to my hotel that night I Googled her, read most of her blog all in one sitting (yes, I was up very late), and decided to figure out this “aggregator” thing I’d heard people talk about so that I could keep up with her. And she’s continued to impress me with her thoughtfulness, genuineness, and kindness.
  • Walt Crawford: I’d been blogging for about a month when he popped into my comments and said really nice things. (I’m a sucker for people saying really nice things to me.) Then mid way through this year of blogging, he did the same thing when I was having blogging doubts. He’s even mentioned me a couple of times in C&I, putting my name right next to the names of other bloggers I respect no end! And you’ve gotta love a guy who takes both the content and the look of the printed word so seriously.
  • Steve Lawson: I’d been reading his blog for a few months when all of a sudden he popped on IM one day to relieve my workplace isolation (all my co-workers were at ALA). Good thing he couldn’t see as I tried to collect myself off the floor and reacquaint my jaw with the rest of my scull! It was my first total fan-girl experience. And the rest is history, as they say. I’m constantly learning how to blog by reading what he writes. He’s got the tone and voice that I aspire to. And beyond that, he’s just a good friend to me.
  • And speaking of friends, Mark Linder has become quite a good one. And he’s almost always online, so when I’m frustrated or lonely or bursting with news that I just need to tell someone, he’s the one I bug.
  • Dorothea Salo: I’m not an IR person, or a systems person, or anything like that. (We all know how much trouble I have grasping basic HTML and CSS. Evidence of ignorance.) But Dorothea’s authorial voice keeps me coming back for more, no matter the content. I’m equally happy listening to her talk about the weather or about mysterious tech-ish script-ish things that I don’t understand at all.

So that’s five, though there are about 10 times that many that I could have included. And I promise not to get this sappy on all of you again (at least, not any time soon). If you don’t like it, blame Walt for getting us all started. :P

7 Comments