Reading Library The future of Web Services isn’t the Library website got me thinking about websites in general. There will always be a need for a specific “place” on the ‘net for organizations and businesses – that’s the website. For most people, however, it won’t occur to them to go to your website for the information that they need. That’s where Karen says that web services come into play. If your site is publishing information in reusable chunks – bits of info that are easily put into other people’s websites, newsletters and profiles (in the case of social networks like MySpace and Facebook) – they don’t have to think about coming to your site to get their information – it’s already there, wherever they may be. Jenny Levine, of the Shifted Librarian blog, just posted a “tweet” that said that the reason for libraries (or any organization, really) to be in social networking site at all is to be found because people don’t remember URLs. (my paraphrase, there…) All of this adds up to the idea that, while we want people to visit us both on- and offline, they may not remember to do so if we aren’t a visible presence where they are. It’s just another take on my “go where our users are” theme, but Karen says it very well!!
Blog Day is a day where all bloggers are asked to recommend 5 blogs that their readers (hi Tab and Margaret – I’d link to you Margaret, but since you don’t have a blog yet…) may not be familiar with. So, without further ado, my 5 blogs:
- New York Times Books Section
- Newshounds – “We watch FOX News so you don’t have to”
- Consumerist – Information about consumer issues – mostly the bad, which is, of course, far more entertaining…
- Web Worker Daily
- 43 Folders – A Getting Things Done blog that is in no way responsible for my lack of getting things done
There you have it – 5 blogs that I regularly read that aren’t specifically about the content of this blog (though that last one may be rather close for comfort, considering all of the times I’ve blogged about the GTD methodology…)
I’m starting to grab posts from the cached feed at Google Reader (thanks ever so much Beth and Google’s cache!!) so that I’ll have at least some of the older posts back up and available. I won’t be recovering all of them – some were just link pointers that have outlived their usefulness, some were downright not interesting enough to go to the trouble to save. I’ll try to recover some more later, when I have time, but it does appear that some of them may be returning to make my little blog seem less bare!
Besides my utter dejection at having lost the last 3 years of work on this blog, I have had other reasons as to why I’m not posting very often. One of which I can share with you all now – I’ve accepted a new position at the library. My boss left the library at the end of the month (July) and I’ve been busy being both him and myself for the last 2 and 1/2 weeks – as well as applying for, interviewing for and accepting his job. Now I get to be both of us again while we look for *my* replacement. Hopefully, in 2 weeks, we’ll have both positions filled and I’ll be able to concentrate on my new duties as Information Technology Manager for the library. Sometime after that, I may begin blogging in a regular way again. Won’t that be fun? As for the other reason(s) I’ve not been blogging, well, we’ll just say that I’m kicking butt with a level 20-something hunter in WoW…
Twitter and the Missouri River Regional Library is the name of the article explaining why my library is Library of the Month for the WebJunction community. Very exciting stuff! Now I actually have to get the twitter account for MRRL active and advertised…
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To View…
Besides the server issues from the last post and frantically running around like a chicken with her head cut off trying to fix all that up, I’ve been busy with other stuff as well. I’ll be presenting another webinar for MORENet in August on what MRRL is doing with the Web 2.0 tools that we taught our staff in the Library Learning 2.0 program this year. I also received an invitation to speak at the UKSG conference in Torquay, Devon, UK on the Library Learning 2.0 program in April of next year. I’ve been working out travel arrangements (whether or not to take my son, mostly) and getting my passport and all that straightened out. I need to renew the passport that I got years ago for my trip to Italy, and after hearing the horror stories of people waiting forever for their passports, I wanted to hop on that ASAP. Besides all that, I’ve been running my son back and forth to so many camps, baseball games/practices and movies with his friends, that I’ve barely had any time to play World of Warcraft.
Oh, yeah, that’s the other big timesink in my life right now. Fortunately, my SO plays it as well, so we manage to get together and kill stuff on a regular basis and it still counts as quality time spent together. Occasionally, when his schedule allows, my son gets in on it too and we have a 3-way WoW party with all of us playing together. That’s great fun as well!
So, with all that going on, I’ve been a bit quiet lately – but I promise to blog more henceforth!
The server on which I had all of my sites, as well as some friends’ sites, and all of my clients’ sites, died. A combination of DoS attacks and crazy server configuration (MySQL was required for the email system to work – that seemed odd to me…) as well as growing clients that needed more resources than I offered meant that the server was somewhat flaky for a couple of weeks and then down completely for the last 2 days of June. I spent the last weekend of June frantically moving data, databases and various zipped up files from one server to the other and finally got everything (that wasn’t mine) up and running last Monday (with only a few small glitches that have since been ironed out). We are now hosted by HostGator and so far, I’m very happy. Interland/Peer1/whatever they are this week was charging a LOT more for far less in the way of resources and “extras”. HostGator includes what Interland/Peer1 considered extras as part of their standard service (stuff like a firewall and spamassassin). This is a VERY nice change. I felt I was getting nickle and dimed to death at Interland/Peer1 – for something that I was overpaying for in the first place. We are into our second week of service at HostGator and I’m VERY pleased so far!
Ok, now that my clients and friends are up and running, I’ll be able to spend some time working on finding the database of all of my posts (I hope I saved it, I hope I saved it, I hope I saved it…imagine me crossing fingers AND toes while muttering that) and updating the blog to let you all know what is going on with me. There are some exciting things coming up, but I’ll save that announcement for after I get my publications/presentations page back up!!
Ummm, I can’t seem to find the database containing the 3+ years of posts that I have made to this blog. I’m sure I downloaded it, but I’m not sure where. Until then, I’ll just post this so the site isn’t COMPLETELY empty…
