Message from Jenny Levine: opportunity knocks. Some people hear it, others claim it’s just squirrels on the roof. tags: jenny levine, opportunity, opportunity knocks, squirrels » about 100 words
No, I’m not talking about the interface our users see in the web browser — there’s enough argument about that — I’m talking about web services, the technologies that form much of the infrastructure for Web 2.0. Once upon a time, the technology that displayed a set of data, let’s say catalog records, was inextricably […] » about 900 words
If I lived in Seattle, I’d look to Beatnickside’s photos for clues about where the fun is. Here’s his photo of the “Iron Composer” competition at The Crocodile Cafe. seattle, washington, seattle wa, crocodile cafe, iron composer, microphone, scream, photo, big, oversize, surreal, big brother, fright, frightening » about 100 words
I caught the following story on NPR’s All Things Considered (RealAudio stream) last night: New York is known for its vibrant nightlife, yet in many bars and restaurants it’s illegal to dance. Now, a law professor is challenging the “Cabaret Laws,” claiming they violate a dancer’s right of free expression. The city says dancing by […] » about 300 words
Contentsbsuite FeaturesChangesInstallationOptionsTag SupportUsing bsuite FunctionsKnown BugsThe first thing we all have to agree on is that bsuite is the replacement for bstat. The name change reflects that fact that the plugin is doing a lot more than simply track page loads. The most exciting new feature is a module I can’t help but call bsuggestive. […] » about 1000 words
Everybody wants a content management system, but there’s little agreement about what a CMS is or what it should do. Even knowledgeable people often find themselves struggling for an answer before giving up and defining a CMS by example. The problem is that we know we want better websites, and we know technology should help, […] » about 500 words
Via Librarian Way I found the LiS Radio webcast of a conversation between Sandra Erdelez and Karen Fischer, two of three editors of Theories of Information Behavior from ASIS&T and Information Today. Unfortunately, the interview focuses on how the book came to be more than the content, but the description reads: overviews of more than […] » about 100 words
bsuite, the follow-up to bstat, now includes a module called “bsuggestive” that recommends related posts based on the current post’s tags or alternate posts based on your search words when you arrive from a recognized search engine. That is, bsuggestive does two neat things: First, visitors will see a section in each post with links […] » about 300 words
I’m about to release a public beta of my WordPress plugin over at MaisonBisson. Information about my favorite new feature, bsuggestive, online now. bsuite started out as bstat, and continues to offer rich stats tracking features.
update: bsuite b2 is out!
With Wayfaring.com you can explore maps created by others, or create your own personalized map. Share them with friends or the whole world.
Now imagine it with Earthcomber integration. Wouldn’t that be neat.
I hadn’t seen Ryan Eby’s post at LibDev that connected ILSs with WordPress before I posted that library catalogs should be like WordPress here. It connects with a my comment on a post at Meredith Farkas’ Information Wants To Be Free. My comment there goes in two directions, but I’d like to focus on the technology side now.
Our vendors will inevitably bend to our demands and add small features here and there, but even after that, we’ll still be stuck paying enormous amounts of money for systems that remain fundamentally flawed. Technology marches on, and inevitably we’ll find some new way to use our catalog data. John Blyberg is talking about this in his ILS customer bill of rights post, and that’s what I was getting at when I say the catalog should be like WordPress.
Meredith asks for more programmers, but as a programmer, I’m asking for her help in demanding smart software design from our vendors.
Roll your own search engine. Create personal search engines using only the sources you trust. Relevant. Reliable. Rollyo.
They call them “searchrolls”
Library catalogs should be be like WordPress. That is, every entry should support comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks. Every record should have a permalink. Content should be tag-able. The look should be easily customizable with themes. Everything should be available via RSS or Atom. It should be extendable with a rich plugin API. And when that fails, it would be nice if it were all written in a convenient language like PHP so we can hack it ourselves.
Among the infrared photos at PBase.com is this plantation infrared collection by Joseph Levy. Above: part of the collection by Richard Higgs. » about 100 words
The sale of Weblogs Inc. to AOL last month for $25+ million got a lot of bloggers excited. Tristan Louis did the math and put the sale value into perspective against the number of incoming links the the Weblogs Inc. properties. It’s an interesting assertion of the value of the Google Economy, no?
The various properties have a total of almost 50,000 incoming links, which work out to being worth between about $500 and $900 each, depending on the actual sale price, which everybody’s mum about.
So Dane Carlson created this (now broken) how much is my blog worth? app based on those numbers and powered by the Technorati API. Zach took a stern look at it (while it was working) and decided the numbers probably represent the gross ad revenues of a blog over four years (or two years with strong growth).
Karen has the smart-sexy-funny thing going on, but that doesn’t stop her from eating donut after donut or beating Will and me in every white-knuckled kart race we ran last weekend. Drivers sit only an inch or two off the ground in karts that are said to go 40 miles an hour. Eight minute races […] » about 200 words
There is, supposedly, some historical meaning to our Thanksgiving holiday, but all I can figure out is that I wasn’t there and it probably didn’t go as I’ve been told. Thing is, Thanksgiving isn’t so much about what we were, but who we are. Thanksgiving celebrates the two most important things in life: food and […] » about 200 words
My wife Sandee cringes at the suggestion that she’s a geek. She writes poetry and teaches English, she cooks fabulous meals and dances all night long. Surely you’re mistaken she’ll say. But she does have a laptop, a digital camera, and an iPod. And she immediately saw the value of having a computer in the […] » about 300 words
According to the recently released Pew Internet report on online activities: On an average day, about 94 million American adults use the internet; 77% will use email, 63% will use a search engine. Among all the online activities tracked, including chatting and IMing, reading blogs or news, banking, and buying, not one of them includes […] » about 100 words
We’ve had snow on the mountains for a while now, but this is the first accumulation in my yard. tags: holiday season, november, snow, snowfall, snowflake, snowflakes, winter » about 100 words
stock.xchng has nothing on Flickr for searching, finding, sharing photos, except that they’re uploaded with the express intention of offering them for re-use. Some are available free, others free for non-commercial use, others with their own license terms.
But stock photos aren’t really the bottom of the barrel. No, for that you have to look at pixellogo. It’s there that you’ll see the sorts of things you can do to put some pop in a limp design. Meaning, it would seem, is secondary.
But don’t let any of this criticism suggest I’m not above taking tips from stock houses.
Everybody likes documentation. The Zend folks posted this overview and SimpleXML introduction The O’Reilly folks at ONLamp offered this guide to using SimpleXML. Of course, there’s always the SimpleXML docs at PHP.net.
Two problems: I haven’t encountered CDATA in my XML yet, but I do hope to develop a better solution than offered here when I do. The other is that SimpleXML chokes on illegal characters, a unfortunately common occurrence in documents coming from III’s XML Server.
I’ve been getting spam, a lot of spam; 3400 spam comments and trackbacks in the last two months or so. So it was a relief to find Akismet, a networked spam blocking plugin for WordPress. They claim to have blocked 318,825 spams since its release, and I’ve been pretty happy with it. tags: akismet, comment […] » about 100 words
Aaron Schmidt’s 10 points about IM in libraries include:
edit: URL fixed as per Aaron’s comment below.
It’s amusing how retailers will try to capture a trend. So retro gaming fans have been building their own arcade cabinets for years now, but I just saw that Target is offering a Midway Arcade Machine for the holidays. The 96-pound machine is described as “full-size” and offers Joust, Defender I and II, Robotron, Rampage, […] » about 100 words