CIL Postconference blues

So after teaching a final post conference on open source content management systems, I’m home from CIL. Had a terrific time. Got great ideas from colleagues, but am completely exhausted. Teaching drains me. The post conference workshop was really great. The small number of attendees facilitated lots of interaction and customization of the workshop content. As Amanda and I dive deeper into these systems we are realizing there is too much to possibly present in a 1/2 day. Which sort of leaves us reorganizing and focusing on a more “what is possible” presentation with some hands-on for the next time we teach it. I’m really psyched that we were able to give people Bitnami files for the different systems. I think it will make it easier for people to play with them. I’m contemplating doing some follow-up screencast content, because well, I really like sharing what I’ve learned with others and I sure have learned alot about Drupal and WordPress as CMSs.

Getting time to talk to colleagues is really the best part of the conference. I did a one-on-one Drupal session for Cindi Trainor which was a blast. I hope she’s able to use the stuff I showed her. Also, I got a couple collaborators interested in my Drupal as digital library prototype project. I’m thrilled about this because it means that I can be exposed to wider variety of use cases than my own institution, which makes for better research and development. I’m certainly got my work cut out for me between now and ALA Annual when I teaching a Web Services preconference with a little help from Jason Clark. We both want to revise our approach and provide a ton more code samples. Which of course have to get written. Sigh. On the bright side, I’ve made progress with getting Yahoo Pipes to play nice with the WorldCat Search API.

All and all it was a good conference. I’m a little bummed to be home and have to got back to the daily grind instead of learning, sharing and working on big pictures stuff. But that is life. Got a ton to get done in office over the next two weeks before I’m off to speak again.