Category: Blogs and Blogging

I got the blog migrated. Then I spent more time than I’d care to divulge applying “labels” (why can’t they call them categories or tags?), which was fun. But I’ve done just about everything I can to make it look like the old blog I’ve come to know and love… with only moderate success. There are some weird formatting issues that I can’t figure out, and I’m too tired and confused to even know how to ask for help.

And what’s with the itty bitty font for the blog archives? Is this kind? I’ll need to pass out complimentary magnifying glasses to my subscribers, sort of like the OED in 4 volumes instead of two dozen.

But now it’s way, way past my bedtime, so I’ll try to stop thinking in blogger code and start composing myself for rest. Wish me luck…

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Ok, so as soon as my little “switch to the new blogger” button comes back (they’ve taken it away because too many people are switching all at once), I’m planning to transition this blog over there. This may mean that you get a whole bunch of posts coming through your aggregators… sorry. Hopefully this will only happen when I first make the switch, though I don’t know what happens when you start applying “labels” and stuff, but I’ll do my best not to spam you with too many updated posts.

Wish me oodles of luck. I definitely do NOT want to spend hours and hours trouble-shooting. But I also want to do this thing on my own terms and not log in one day and find that it’s been done for me.

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If I’ve learned nothing else in the last 18 months of being a librarian, I’ve learned that everyone has their own preferred method for keeping up with the world around them. I heart RSS. Unless there’s a feed, a page is pretty much dead to me. I won’t remember to go back and check later for updates. I won’t.

I still remember the day that my colleagues recommended I use Thunderbird for my email client because it’s easy, customizable, and “it has an RSS reader!” The first time I heard that, I figured I just hadn’t heard right. They must have said some word that I didn’t hear and it sounded to me like “r s s.” The second time somebody said that I realized that I’d run across another library acronym…. So I asked what the heck this RSS thing was. Somebody explained it. I thought, “Huh, that’s interesting,” and promptly forgot about it until I started reading people’s blogs last spring. Then it all became clear.

It’s kind of like when you first got a microwave and you thought, “that might be useful sometimes.” Now you can’t imagine life without it. That’s the way it was for me and RSS.

Anyway, I also keep up with a couple of email lists, but I read those through my gmail account because I was being crushed by my inbox every morning, even with handy filters and folders set up. So now my work inbox is just that. It’s my inbox for email I receive from or about work. I can (usually) keep up with it, and I’m much less overwhelmed.

But what works for me doesn’t work for everyone so, by popular request, I’ve added a “subscribe by email” link under my RSS feed on the left-hand column. If you prefer getting my posts in your inbox, now you can.

And while we’re on the topic, I just found out (while setting up the email subscription option) that my Feedburner stats say that I’m only getting 40% of my subscribers through Bloglines! If that’s true of all of my feeds, that means I have somewhere around 150 subscribers! I had NO idea. I wish there were a way to track my atom and rss feeds the way Feedburner tracks its own feed.

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As part of the strategic plan development we went through at the end of last year, the library staff decided to go about watching trends and developments in library land more intentionally than we have been so far. Like most librarians, we do our best to keep up with developments, but we wanted a way to learn from each other and to make sure that we collectively watch topics that are of interest to the library as a whole. So each department came up with a list of potential “watch list” topics and then we narrowed it down to “only” 38 topics. Now all we needed was a place to gather all of our watching and learning in one place.

Enter the Library Watch List Blog. (I would link to it, but it’s password protected, so there’s no point.) We had an all-staff training session on basic WordPress blogging and then divvied up the topics so that even though we can each write about any topic, we also have someone responsible for each of the topics. And today, I posted to it for the first time (and I’m the 8th post).

I sure hope this blog takes off, not only because it’ll be a fabulous resource but also because it’ll give us a chance to learn collaboratively from each other while simultaneously practicing some social software use. It may be hard for some people, though. It takes a good bit of time, and blogging is completely foreign to some staff members (I know that I would have been pretty hesitant a year ago). Still, I think there’s a good chance that some people will really take to it, and I look forward to learning from my co-workers.

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