Hey folks – I just spent an hour or so of my Sunday morning (cause that’s how big a nerd I am) updating my Letterhead theme to be widget-ready. You can download it and give it a whirl in Zip format only now – I didn’t have the time to tar.gz it, so it’s just a zip file. I’ll put it back on the sidebar for downloads eventually. Updates to the theme are found in the readme file in the zipped archive, but it’s pretty basic and very easy to use!
The London Times has released its picks for the 50 Top Food Blogs in the World. A friend of mine tweeted about it, bemoaning the fact that there was no OPML file to go with it… Never one to pass up an opportunity to screw around with my Google Reader, I added in all 50 blogs (some of which I already subscribed to, but some of which were new to me) and exported the list for you all to do the same – only much more easily! The OPML file is here – download it, import it into your feed reader and you should see a new folder with 50 of the best food blogs in the world populating it. Easy as pie, one might say!!
A quote from an email interview I gave on using Twitter in my writing career is up at The Adventurous Writer. It’s a quick quote about how I got my book deal, but I thought I’d point you all to it anyway since there are lots of quotes from other writers in there too with interesting stories and ideas for using Twitter for writing.
The website for “Library Mashups” has been created and is available to peruse, just to whet your appetite for the actual book itself – due out sometime this year. I contributed a chapter to it – the LibraryThing Mashups chapter – and it looks like a lot of other folks contributed a lot of other really interesting chapters to the book as well. Check it out and send it on to your library’s collection development folks for inclusion in your professional collection. That’s what I’m about to do!
I haven’t listened to the audio portion of the interview yet – I’ve just read the text part. I’m a little scared to listen to the audio – I always think I sound like an idiot… Anyway, MaintainIT has chosen little ol’ me as the Library Spotlight for this month. Very exciting stuff!!
Update: I just listened to the audio and I actually don’t sound like as much of an idiot as I thought. You all have my permission to listen to it now…
For Christmas this year, I got inspired to do some cooking! My BF’s mother gave me How To Cook Everything by Mark Bittman (who also does the Minimalist TivoCast, which is great fun) and I’ve been reading it cover-to-cover. So far, I’m through “everything you ever wanted to know about noodles” and getting ready to find out everything about bread. I’ve already been through the veggies, fruits and seafood chapters. It truly is a bible for folks who want a cookbook that gives them more than just static directions on how to make a single food item – there are almost no recipes in the book (so far) that don’t have multiple variations so that you can take the basic recipe (of which there are 2000) and make up to 20 different foods using that one recipe, with just a few variations. My friend Tab also got me the Better Homes & Gardens “pink plaid” edition of the kitchen essential cookbook. My mom has one of these (though I think it’s the original edition – it’s really old and “well-loved”…) and it was the go-to cookbook when I cooked at home with her. Now I have one of my own!! Yeah!
My boyfriend got, also from Doug and Tab, the Alton Brown salt cellar and a set of Alton Brown Plunger measuring cups. Since I got Tab the Gear For Your Kitchen book by Alton Brown, we’re thinking that Alton did pretty well this year…
So far, from the “How to cook everything” cookbook, I’ve made an asparagus and parmesan risotto, a lentils and potatoes with curry dinner and fried zucchinis. Yum! I also noticed a recipe for truffles in the BH&G cookbook last night that I might have to try out…
Also – and you thought I was done – my BF’s mom got me a year’s subscription to the Taste of Home magazine, something that I regularly “borrow” from my Mom. Mom is happy to know that her issues will be staying put from now on!
It wasn’t a *completely* foodie Christmas, though – my family got a Wii (which has inspired me to get a Wii Fit for it – I’m going to have to make up for all the cooking I’ll be doing somehow) as well as a bunch of Wii games. I got some clothes and some cash, which was nice. Alex got mostly cash, so we spent a lovely afternoon at the Columbia Mall last weekend, spending $241 on new clothes for my little clotheshorse… He left the mall with $9 in cash and a beatific grin on his face, so I think he was happy with his Christmas as well.
I hope all of my readers had a wonderful holiday season – while it is fun to play with all the new stuff that the holiday season brings, I hope that everyone also got some rest, some time with their loved ones and a new outlook for the new year!
Reading through Bill’s comment on my previous post, I was reminded that I meant to tell you all about a very cool, and very related, compendium of information that the folks at the MuniGov 2.0 organization have compiled. The Web 2.0 Security page is basically an annotated collection of reports and “thought pieces” from all over the web, put together and given to us for free! There are positive and negative pieces included – you can read through them and make up your own mind, but as Bill so nicely stated in his comment – our job as IT people is to *support* business use, not stand in the way of our internal customers as they try to do their jobs. If we can do that and maintain security, we’re golden!
Update to the update – I just found a link (via the privacyala Twitter account to an article on Facebook & privacy. The sentence that makes it relevant to this post is:
Policymakers cannot make Facebook completely safe, but they can help people use it safely.
I’m headed off to read the article now, but thought I’d post a quick update here first, to let others know about it!
For those who haven’t heard about it, Rachel Singer Gordon has started a new review service for libraries that focuses on Computer books & topics. The Tech Static is a resource for anyone who buys computer or technology books for libraries. I am one of the reviewers, and my first review, for The Productive Programmer is now up! Enjoy!!
Check out this slide deck from Razorfish on “What if Amazon & iTunes were to use Facebook Connect” (explanation of FB Connect on slides 1-10, imagination starts on slide 11).
Ok – that’s interesting enough – but what if libraries hooked into FB Connect? What sort of things could we do with the information in people’s profiles to “personalize” their experience on our websites? I imagine a lot of the suggestions for Amazon would be applicable to libraries, but surely we could think of other ways to use that Facebook data, too!
Those of you who follow me on Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed are probably already aware of this, but for the rest of you…. I’ve just signed a contract to write a book! I’ll be banging out lots and lots and lots of words on the phenomenon of microblogging (think Twitter and Tumblr) and lifestreaming (think FriendFeed) and how libraries can use such phenomena to reach out to their patrons. This book will be part of a series of books all on various aspects of social media/phenomenon and their uses in libraries. I’ll let the other authors announce their own titles, but from what I know so far, the series is going to seriously kick some ass. Emphasis via profanity totally intentional there, by the way….
Anyway – this gives me a bit of pause as to the future of this blog (at least in the short term). Now that the blog has helped me on my way to lots of writing assignments (don’t forget to check out my Library Tech Report from ALA that will be out about the time this book is due in to the publisher next year…), I’m so busy writing other things that I may not have time to write here. Hopefully I’ll be able to do *some* posting, but I will definitely be keeping up with my Twitter and FriendFeed accounts, so posting will continue to happen – albeit in a shorter format – there.
