Lending a helping hand

Its nice to be able to see the work one does help move people towards there goals. Since starting to do some work at LISHost, I’ve gotten the chance to work on two fun WordPress projects. Most of the work is being done by the site owners but I help out here and there. Mostly with creating customized templates, teaching people about how some of the more tricked out themes like Atahualpa work or suggesting plugins. Its all pretty trivial to me.

Today Blake and I got an email from one of our clients thanking us for our help, which prompted me to go back and take a look at how things had come together for them. I haven’t had time to check on them in a while. Overall, the Warren CT History site is pretty snazzy for being put together by one hard working volunteer with the help from us LISHost folks. Its amazing the doors that a little help opens up for people and how it empowers them to do more and move towards their goals.

The peer reviewed script is another bit of work/code/knowledge that I never would have dreamed at how many folks seems to be interested in and find useful. Who’d have thunk? What seems like NBD to me is a big deal for some other folks. All and all, a part of me can’t help but grin and do a little jig to see how little things make such a big difference.

In my own little world help from the code4lib channel got me through a tough spot last Friday where I was struggling with an evil screenscrape. Thanks to Rob Casson, Mark Matienzo and some other code4lib folks I was able get my head wrapped around the fact it was an encoding issue and move forward. This kind of lending a helping hand and sharing is really important to libraries. Its how we learn and move stuff forward. Part of me believes in geek karma and that if I help someone out with code, someone will help me with code. So far its worked out pretty well.