Posted in General Thoughts on May 31st, 2006 No Comments »
Andrew Pace has a great post about talking to programmers over at TechEssence. He talks about how much librarians can learn by talking to IT people and in particular programmers. My experiences with programmers have been very similar to Andrew’s. I’ve loved dearly the programmers I’ve worked with in the past and I’ve learned a [...]
Posted in Wikis on May 25th, 2006 2 Comments »
A while ago I wrote about adding a WYSIWYG editor to Mediawiki and lamented that at the time one problem with the FCKEditor implemention of the WYWISYG was that you had to modify the base Mediwiki code. A royal pain when you have to upgrade. However, the creator of that hack has created a full [...]
Posted in RSS on May 24th, 2006 7 Comments »
For a while, I’ve been using CiteULike to get RSS feeds of the table of contents of new journal issues. Its really useful for journals that CiteULike is able to index table of contents. However, there are several magazines/journals that aren’t available via CiteULike that I’d like to be able to keep a closer eye [...]
Posted in Findability, Web 2.0 on May 24th, 2006 1 Comment »
Back in March John Blyberg had a fabulous post entitled “Library 2.0 Websites: Where to begin?” that made my month. This post has been a touchstone for me all spring, because it is extremely relevant to things that I am working on right now. First, we are in the middle of building a content management [...]
Posted in General Thoughts on May 17th, 2006 1 Comment »
It is amazing how brutal some days are. Work can be emotionally, and psychological draining sometimes. The worse feeling for me is to have put time and effort into something get emotionally behind it and then start questioning myself. Today was one of those days. I’ve been working as part of a group to develop [...]
Posted in Wikis on May 17th, 2006 2 Comments »
Today I got the Mediawiki-based wiki farm I’ve been testing move to our production open source webserver. Overall it was a fairly simple process but I wanted to share a few things that I learned from the experience.
First, being able to do this type of thing quickly and easily relies on being able to create [...]
Posted in Wikis on May 8th, 2006 10 Comments »
I spent the better part of the end of last week working on extending Mediawiki for our institution. One thing that was really important to me was being able to add users to Mediawiki from our Active Directory user and assign them to specific group. Normally, the way Mediawiki works I would have to wait [...]
Posted in Library Systems, Tech Demons on May 5th, 2006 3 Comments »
I have a sinking suspicion that MPOW blocks IRC traffic (I recently confirmed this with campus IT). I can understand why this might be. Wanting productive employees and trying to keep the network secure. However, I have a legitimate use for IRC in my job. There is an IRC channel called #code4lib whose members have [...]
Posted in Wikis on May 1st, 2006 10 Comments »
One of the things that I wanted to get set up in our wiki test-bed was a WYSIWYG editor for wiki pages. You might find yourself asking “why would you want to have a WYSWIYG editor in a wiki when there is wiki-markup”? The reason I wanted to install a WYSIWYG editor is that although [...]
