Situation: you’ve got WordPress Multi-User setup to host one or more domains in sub-directory mode (as in site.org/blogname), but you want a deeper directory structure than WPMU allows…something like the following examples, perhaps:
site.org/blogname1
site.org/departments/blogname2
site.org/departments/blogname3
site.org/services/blogname3
The association between blog IDs and sub-directory paths is determined in wpmu-settings.php, but the code there knows nothing about nested paths. So a [...]
Posted September 15, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: cms, hack, hacks, information architecture, url path, wordpress, WordPress MU, wpmu. 6 Comments.
The following was my email response to a thread on the web4lib mail list:
Okay, it must be said: you’re all wrong[1].
I can understand that news of a librarian being fired/furloughed will raise our defenses, but that’s no excuse for giving up the considered and critical thinking that this occasion demands.
Consider this: the principle’s blog reveals [...]
Posted August 6, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy. Tags: Franklin High School, lib20, libraries, library 2.0, Milford MA, web4lib. Be the first one.
The description to David McNicol’s URL Cache Plugin raises more questions than it answers:
Given a URL, the url_cache() function will attempt to download the file it represents and return a URL pointing to this locally cached version.
Where did he plan to use it? Does he envision the cache as an archive, or for performance? Why hasn’t [...]
Posted June 10, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Blink, Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: cache, perm-permalinks, plugin, web archiving, wordpress, wordpress plugin. One Comment.
Bret Victor offers the above design suggestions (from 2006) to Amazon in the book search results display (he’s comparing to this). I didn’t discover them at the time, but many of them are still relevant now. Bret notes that Amazon’s display doesn’t do a good job of answering the questions a person has when searching for [...]
Posted June 9, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: amazon, lib20, libraries, library 2.0, search results. 2 Comments.
The Hanzo Archives Wordpress plugin is something I’d be very excited to use. Ironically, it’s disappeared from the web (though the blog post hasn’t):
We’ve released a Wordpress Plugin which automatically archives anything you link to in your blog posts; it also adds a ‘perma-permalink’ for the archived version adjacent to each original link.
An Amazon Web [...]
Posted June 9, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Blink, Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: archive, Hanzo Archives, link rot, perma-permalink, permalink, plugin, web archive, wordpress. Be the first one.
Above is Peter Linsley speaking about Google Image Search at SMX West in February, 2009.
Meanwhile, Stefan Juhl suggests some JavaScript to break your site out of the image search result pages:
Many Google image search users are quickly clicking on to the direct image URL and thereby not seeing the page with the image. Also, it [...]
Posted May 27, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: google, google image search, image searching, seo. Be the first one.
It turns out that there are a lot of differences between Google’s regular web crawler and the Google News crawler. And though very few of us will find our content included in Google News, it still seems like a good idea to make our content conform to their technical requirements. Here are a few of [...]
Posted April 23, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Dispatches, Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: google news, search engine optimization, seo, web design. Be the first one.
Facebook’s guide to sharing details some meta tags to make that sharing work better:
In order to make sure that the preview is always correctly populated, you should add the tags shown below to your html. An example news story could have the following:
<meta name="title" content="Smith hails ‘unique’ Wable legacy" />
<meta name="description" content="John Smith claims beautiful [...]
Posted April 21, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Blink, Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: facebook, meta tags, metadata, social sharing, social software. One Comment.
 study sponsored by the WiFi alliance reveals the following:
WiFi and college choice
90% of college students say Wi-Fi access is as essential to education as classrooms and computers
57% say they wouldn’t go to a college that doesn’t have free Wi-Fi
79% say that without Wi-Fi access, college would be a lot harder
60% agree that widely available Wi-Fi [...]
Posted April 16, 2009 by Casey Bisson
Categories: Dispatches, Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: connectivity, education, networks, social software, wifi. Be the first one.
