For less than $5 a month you can have space on a web server. For a few bucks a year you can have your own domain name. With a computer at the public library and a plain text editor you can then publish a website that can be seen more or less all over the world. THAT IS PUNK ROCK. It just requires a tiny bit of knowledge and effort to do your own thing. You should do it.
Computers in Libraries is going well. Getting some good ideas. I’m not even trying to blog in real time. I’ll write some stuff up tonight.
On a more nut-and-bolts level, I need some clothes. It is colder here than in Texas. A simple jacket and some new jeans would do. I’ll see if there is some reasonable shopping around here tonight. My guess is “no”.
OK, I flew into the DC/Arlington area this morning. Checked in to the hotel (the fabulous Hampton in which seems to have a screaming broadband connection), and my old college roommate came over. We went to the International Spy Museum. It was way cool. Ring-guns, rectal capsules for hiding cyanide pills, lock picking, and various other forms of skullduggery — lots of fun.
Rode up there on the Metro. Very cool subway train system. The stations look like something from Logan’s Run meets Escape from the Planet of the Apes (the one with the underground mutants).
Afterward we ate at a beer and burger place across the street from the museum – Gordon Beircsch Brewery Restaurant. Good Burger. German-ish beer. Good time hanging with MB.
Now I’m back at the Hampton, getting ready to chill and read. Get some rest of a day of conferencing. The schedule looks really good. Hopefully there’ll be some tours set up. If not I’ll try to take on anyway.
Next week I’ll be at the Computers in Libraries conference, in Arlington, VA. Looking forward to an interesting few days full of new ideas. I’ll be blogging it, in full nerd attack mode.
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.
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.