DIY Librarian

DIY Librarian is back up and running, with a new look. Let me know what you think of it.

Sorry if old posts showed up in the RSS feed while I was working. I was fixing some bad coding before I remembered that editing posts makes them show up in the feed again.

…while we work out some issues with the DIY Librarian WordPress theme.

Inspired by a how-to post at TangognaT, I have added a favicon to DIY Librarian.

To accomplish this, I created a 16×16 image in PhotoShop, saved it as a BMP file, changed the name to favicon.ico (despite dire warnings from Windows about my certain doom upon changing a file extension), and uploaded it to the DIY Librarian root directory. Ta da!

I’ve installed the Weighted Categories plugin for WordPress, so now there is a category cloud in the sidebar instead of the old list of categories. To make some more room in the sidebar, I took out the monthly archive links. I never thought they were very useful.

So far, Spam Karma seems to be working quite nicely. Since I installed it, not a single spam comment or trackback has appeared.

While I was messing around with the ol’ blog, I made some changes in the sidebar. I removed the list of links, which was kind of an arbitrary selection anyway, and replaced it with links to my Bloglines and del.icio.us pages. The del.icio.us page is new and primarily contains pages that don’t have feeds. That may change as I use it more.

I seem to have gone very quickly from “Ooh, look, people are commenting on my blog!” to using the voodoo doll my friend brought back from New Orleans to inflict horrible pain on spambots. Finally, I broke down and installed Spam Karma. I’m feeling optimistic about it, so I went ahead and enabled trackbacks while I was tinkering.

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.0.2. I don’t expect any complications—I already migrated my work blog (which is much larger but still in beta mode) without any problems—but if anything looks or acts strange, I will blame the upgrade.

I’m not usually a big fan of these graphical HTML editors (the one in plone drives me nuts and the one in WordPress 1.5.x wasn’t all that useful) but so far I like the WordPress 2.0.2 interface. I love the post preview feature.

librarian.net, one of my main inspirations for starting DIY Librarian, turned 7 yesterday. In celebrating her milestone, Jessamyn notes the homogenizing effect of using a CMS:

And then a weird thing happens… all my entries from September 2003 on are all in WordPress. I imported the Movable Type entries when I moved, and so there is an odd sameness to the rest of my posts, even though things have clearly happeend and I have remained your trusty correspondent through thick and thin. It’s not the same thing, browsing a month’s worth of entries from three years ago when they don’t look any different from today’s entries.

I resisted moving from a hand-coded blog to a CMS for many of the same reasons. When I first started DIY Librarian (then referred to in all lower case letters), I sometimes used different stylesheets for each month—a Halloween stylesheet for October, or a Valentine’s Day style for February. The old entries are still there, but when I did some redesigning I had to fix some of my hacked-out HTML code and just applied one stylesheet to the whole mess. Now that I am using WordPress, any style changes will automatically apply to the whole blog. The holiday-themed logos I designed are still there: Halloween DIY Librarian, Halloween DIY Librarian 2004, St. Patrick’s Day DIY Librarian, and my favorite, Valentine’s Day DIY Librarian. I was able to retrieve a few primitive iterations of DIY Librarian using the Wayback Machine: September 2003 (the stylesheet seems to be having some issues) and October 2004 (with the Halloween stylesheet and a photo of the pumpkin plant which my landlady subsequently “disappeared”—apparently the front stoop is not the appropriate place for pumpkin-farming, unbeknownst both to myself and to the previous tenant who dropped seeds there during while carving a pumpkin).

In the beginning, I was using the blog as much to practice my coding as to publish my writing. Now, I’m more concerned with the writing and learning how to tweak a CMS than I am with the coding.

I started DIY Librarian in the summer of 2003. This year, I think I took the biggest steps since I first started blogging. Way back in 2003 I wasn’t sure how much I would like blogging or whether I would stick with it. I was also a little nervous about putting myself out on the Internet. In 2005, I migrated the blog to its own domain and started using WordPress. I opened up comments and have been very happy with the results—some thoughtful comments on my posts, and very little spam. You can still access the pre-WordPress posts at my old site.

Coinciding with the move and subsequent increased exposure (I have no empirical evidence of that, but it certainly seems like more people are reading DIY Librarian now) I’ve tried to focus a bit more on professional issues. This is still a fairly lighthearted endeavor, and subject to my personal whims and schedule. I do occasionally post about things that are tangetially library-related at best, but so do many of the library bloggers I most enjoy reading. I don’t announce blogging breaks because I usually don’t know about them myself. Quite often, I don’t post because I simply have nothing to say.

I signed up for a Google Analytics account so that I can track some minimal information about my blog. I get web stats for some other sites that I manage, and I only trust them so far, but there is some interesting stuff in there. For instance, I can see that one of the most popular keyword searches leading to my site is “librarian”. Seriously, how many pages of results did you have to scroll through to get to DIY Librarian?

I’ve been mentioned a few times in This Week In LibraryBlogLand (which sadly doesn’t seem to be active right now) and had a booth at Carnival of the Infosciences #17.

2005 was a good year for DIY Librarian, I think. There are still a lot of things I’d like to improve on, both technically and in my writing, but that’s part of the appeal of blogging for me. I can meddle away to my heart’s content.

Here’s to a happy & healthy 2006!

I’ve given up on trying to make rounded borders work in Internet Explorer, and reworked the DIY Librarian stylesheet a bit.