Category Archives: Internet Librarian

California Trip — episode 2.

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Well, I got to Monterey the other day, rented a car, and drove up to Mill Valley (in Marin County) to visit my old skating buddy Dale. When I got there, Dale had grilled up some insanely good chicken, which was great as I was quite hungry. We ate, and then watched a documentary about 1980s vert skating ripper, Jason Jesse.

Saturday we both got up kind of late, had some breakfast at a local eatery, shopped for skate shoes for Dale, and then in the afternoon went for an excellent hike on one of the many trails around Dale’s neighborhood. Later in the evening we went to see the new film, “W”. The film was enjoyable, but strange. Too over the top to be serious, but not funny enough to be a comedy. But there were some really funny parts.

I know Dale would like to have gotten some skating in. I’m happy though that as old skate friends, our friendship isn’t just confined to skating. 

Got up this morning, had breakfast, and drove down to Mountain View for a freestyle session with Gary Holl and the guys from sk8kings.com. Lots of fun. I always enjoy skating with Gary, who is an amazing skater. He always gets some nice pics of me skating. Here is one below. 

Big thanks to Dale and Gary for their hospitality.

After the session I drove back down to Monterey and checked into my hotel, which is where I am right now. Looking forward to the Internet Librarian conference tomorrow.

Me, doing a 180 casper. Photo by Gary Holl.

Me, doing a 180 casper. Photo by Gary Holl.

Chillin’ at LAX

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Well, I’m on my way to Monterey, California, sitting here in the Los Angeles airport waiting for my flight up north. The tmobile internet connection here is WAAAAY faster than my shitty cable modem wifi at home.

Anyway, I have a nice 2.5 hour wait for my flight. Not much to do except surf the web. Looking forward to a fun weekend. Will take some pics as soon as there is an interesting subject. The Internet Librarian conference starts on Monday. Should be great, as always. 

Right now, I’m ready to chill with my friend Dale, have some relaxing and fun skate sessions, chill, and skate some more.

Holy cow – they’re playing the Electric Light Orchestra here in the terminal. Nice.

Internet Librarian Conference 2007

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I see that a number of people have read my posts from last year’s Internet Librarian conference.

I didn’t go this year — 2007. Decided to go to Computers in Libraries in 2008 instead. The Internet Librarian is always a great conference, but I didn’t want to get in a rut. Also, I’m just frickin’ tired of Monterey.

Internet Librarian 2006 Notes: Javascript and RSS

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At last year’s Internet Librarian conference, RSS was a very popular topic. I came home and related all I had learned about RSS to my fellow librarians. I told them about RSS, XML, feed aggregators, etc. After a month went by I sorta felt like it wasn’t that useful. At that point, I really didn’t think most patrons would be into it. How many would actually get an aggregator? Not many, I think.

Over the last year, however, the web development world really seems to have figured out how to make RSS useful. A lot of portals, like My Yahoo!, allow you put new feeds on your homepage. Stuff like that is all RSS. Podcasting has really taken off, and as noted earlier, to be true podcasting one must be able to subscribe to it. And the subscription is all RSS. People are using RSS without knowing it.

So for those of us who manage web sites, what does this mean? Well, there are a lot of Javascript tools out there that we can use to put news feeds on our webpages. I will refer again to the LibrarianInBlack for some details about the session. Likewise, the presenters at this session have put their very useful material on this wiki for our convenience. The “Tools” page on this wiki is particularly cool. It includes tools for creating RSS feeds, taking multiple feeds and blending them into one, tools for syndicating podcasts, and tools for displaying RSS feeds on webpages. Very, very cool.

One potential hangup for me is that most of these require putting some Javascript code into my webpages. Unfortunately, our content management system may not allow it. There’s a good chance it will simply strip out that code if I paste it in. Our Sharepoint intranet site may be a little more flexible, but I’ll have to explore this.

I’m hoping this stuff will be useful for several applications. First, I’d like to have an intranet page that aggregates news feeds from organizations relevant to our city government. I’d also to be able to create a feed for stuff from our intranet site. For the public library, I’d like to use RSS to allow librarians to update some of the “internet links” pages from outside the content management system. I’d also like the public library website to include an RSS feed of our news and events that our users could subscribe to. And of course, I want us to do some podcasting, so we need to be able to syndicate that content too.