Posted in General Thoughts on Aug 21st, 2004 No Comments »
You're Athletes, Not Journalists
Olympians can do media interviews but they'd better not blog. The International Olympic Committee, interested in protecting lucrative broadcasting contracts, forbids any activity that might upset the networks. [Wired News]
When I read this on Wired I was really annoyed. One of the best things about blogging is that it gives a [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on Aug 21st, 2004 No Comments »
Create bibliographies from FURL
This is realy neat. Will Richardson mentions that Furl now allows users to export their bookmarks into MLA, APA, Chicago, and CBE bibliographies. This quote is taken from Mike Giles' weblog (he's the guy behind FURL):
“The export page just got updated to include two new features. First, you can now export items [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on Aug 19th, 2004 No Comments »
XP SP2 Woes
Windows XP Service Pack 2 is coming out soon and in preparation I have been doing a little testing of the library's web-based systems and services. The two biggest concerns with the service pack are the firewall for which in turned on in the default install and the pop-up blocker which is now [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on Aug 18th, 2004 No Comments »
XHTML Illegal Characters and entities
This week I've been getting reaquainted with the illegal characters and entities in XHTML Strict. It seems that only the following entities are valid in XHTML Strict
& - ampersand ( & )
< - less than, open bracket ( < )
> - greater than, close bracket ( > )
" - double quote [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on Aug 18th, 2004 No Comments »
Web Standards Checklist
Web Standards Checklist from MaxDesign illustrates there is more to standards compliant design than just having a tables-free design. This checklist outlines the things that you need to do on your site to make sure that all required things are covered. I'm saving this one to use on the redesign of Library Web Chic. [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on Aug 17th, 2004 No Comments »
XML-based Blogging Tool Goes Live
So today I put into place our new XML-based blogging tool for the library's website. Thus far it is is working like a charm. The biggest challenge has been writing the XSL files to transform the XML in the multiple ways we are using it on our site. I am learning [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on Aug 17th, 2004 No Comments »
Dynamic Breadcrumbs Courtesy of XML
So today in the frantic push (myself and Amanda; the new library webmaster) to get the library's site redesign up Amanda stumbled on another great use for XML. This is the niftiest bit of code to do dynamic breadcrumbs. It needed and still needs a bit of tweaking but it is [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on Aug 14th, 2004 No Comments »
Bell and Shank hooking up with Hope
Now this is great news. My “Keeping Current” cohort Steven Bell and his colleague, John Shank, have created an online community with the help of Hope Kandel (whom I worked with on a few occasions) at Learning Times. It's called the Blended Librarian:
A Blended Librarian is “[an] academic [...]
Posted in XML on Aug 12th, 2004 No Comments »
UTF-8 Troubles
I've been working on a project using an export of XML data that is giving me fits. Some records in the export don't seem to be properly encoded in UTF-8. As a result, when I try to do any sort of transform on the file it won't work. Overall the project has been very [...]
Posted in General Thoughts, Library Systems on Aug 11th, 2004 No Comments »
Reading posts on one of my listservs today I discovered a new use for web server logs. Our library implemented the ILLiad interlibrary loan system about a year ago. Since that time our overall number of ILL requests has increased. The staff has recently began to question whether or not users are utilizing the materials [...]
