Last Post

Unless my new site crashes and burns and dies, this will be my very last post here on blogger. Please join me at my new location!!!

Time for a little trip

Well, I wanted to wait until it was perfect before I let you all (what all six of you, lol) where the new blog is. Unfortunately I have realized that this isn't really possible, especially because I don't know how to code, as I'm sure most of you know.

So, I'm trhowing my hands up in the air, and steering you all towards the new site which is: http://theunlibrarian.net/blog. Please remember that the site is not yet finished, and some day soon there will actually be an index page and everything. But, until then, please visit the new unLibrarian

Hopefully, this will be my last post on the blogger site. Please sign up for my new RSS Feed!!!

What Did I Do?

I've stated time and time again in numerous places that I am NOT a web design genius. Nope, not me. I fake it pretty well sometimes, but then there are times like now...

I don't know why I'm posting this, because if I didn't you would never have known.

Screwed up my blog, that I did. I've been working on the new blog at a domain of my very own. I opened up Dreamweaver, which had remained stagnant for the past year or so, and got to work. After a few hours, I pretty much remembered how to use the software and thought I was well on my way. Then two things happened:

1. I realized that I don't know ANYTHING
2. I somehow managed to overwrite the admin files on the new blog

Uh oh.

My first problem was trying to get my header image and text to remain the proper size (spanning the entire width of the page) regardless on resolution, browser, etc. I tried everything I could think of, but just couldn't get the stupid thing to work. So, I decided to go for 90%. I'll have it span 90% by putting an image in a table in a layer in a table on the page and centering it. Problem solved, right?

Wrong.

Being the moderately OCD person I believe myself to be, the fact that the header image is about 4 mm off and the title thingy below it is about 3 mm from the center of the page is driving me INSANE. I must have deleted the entire page and started anew a dozen times, always resulting in the same problem. What's the URL, you ask? I'm not going to tell you!!! I will not put this imperfection on display for the world to see!

Next problem: The image I am using in the header magically grows to FOUR TIMES it's size somewhere between Dreamweaver and the internet...hmmm....I've resized the image a million times, and when I put the page online, 1/4 of the image is showing, taking up the entire space reserved for the whole image. I will not use the adjectives that come to mind. This is after all a quasi-professional thing, right?

Other topics of frustration include:

• when alignment fails
• when a color is lost
• when a border isn't a border isn't a border
• when things appear in bright blue and refuse to be changed
• when I want to throw my computer out the window

Then, I decide to work on the actual blog. I mean, since I finally got The Library Rebooted: Unwrapped done, I am now decently able to work on my own blog design, right?

Ha!

I go to log in to my account on the new blog. It should take me to the admin page. Instead, it takes me to what appears to be the index page of my website (not even the blog), minus the images. I don't even want to know. My best guess is that I overwrote something I shouldn't have. Fortunately, I still had the files on my hard drive, so I replaced the admin folders, being confident it would fix the entire problem. Wrong again.

So, with my head hung low, and my tail between my legs, I called Sonya, the web mistress extraordinaire, who is being kind enough to stop by tomorrow and turn me into the web designer that I long to be, not to mention to fix up what I've already destroyed.

*sigh*

Packed Up and Ready to Go

My little library blog is moving!!! Keep your eye out for my new location.

A Deity Gets Older.

Happy birthday to the blog-goddess, Jessamyn West!

Adventures in Stylesheets

I am now maintaining my 5th blog!!! And get this, it was not only voluntary, but was my idea! What was I thinking? So far, I "oversee", I guess the APB Blog, the MLC Communique Blog (though this one takes very little work on my part), one blog that I'm not going to share, this, my "Geeky Librarian Blog", and the all new MLC The Library Rebooted: Unwrapped blog.

So, on Thursday I got this idea...since I'm putting together this program series on library 2.0 schtuff, why not record the process using library 2.0 technologies: So, I proposed to the powers that be that we invite all of our presenters, mlc staff and topic experts (mostly the ones who turned down my speaker requests for whatever reason) to post to this blog. Then, we can Podcast the programs and post those to the blog as well. Sounds cool, right?

My question: How did I become so good and creating work for myself???

So, I spent most of today and yesterday working on the new blog. OMG. It's really hard to work with stylesheets and PHP when you've never worked with, studied or even discussed stylesheets or PHP. Mark, our tech-master at work helped me a lot, but we just couldn't get it right. It was so close. I know Mark could have fixed, but the truth of it is:

1. Mark is extraordinarily busy
2. I am extraordinarily impatient

That being said, I decided to try to fix the little problems myself, maybe just make it a bit better, but then of course ended up going to Mark to have him fix what I messed up. I thought we had everything perfect when I received an email from our blog-mistress presenter for our New Technologies program, informing me that the title of my blog was invisible, unless you hovered over it. Well, I checked on my PC, using Firefox and it was fine. We checked on other computers. It was fine. Then Jessamyn told me she was using Firefox (same as me), but on a Mac...

Oh...

So, Ruth and I explored other browsers and discovered that the title was invisible on Mac's using Firefox and PC's using IE.

Great.

I IM'd Mark (no, I'm not being hypocritical about being "over" IM. At work we have this system that lets us do all kinds of phone and VM stuff and also includes in office IM), begging him to fix it, though I knew he was in a meeting. Meanwhile, the oh-so wonderful Jessamyn West emailed me and offered to check out the code. I normally do not ask our presenters to fix my blogs, but she's the blog mistress, right? Then, I got Jessamyn's reply. She was very kind, and looked at my hack job coding, and found the problem.

Jessamyn:
I think the problem is this

a:link {
color: #1D4723;
font-weight: bold;
text-decoration: none;
}

that makes the font green in a link situation. You already have the
mlctitle set here:

a.mlctitle {
color: #ededed;
font-size: 3.2em;
}
a.mlctitle:visited {
color: #FCFEF4;
}
td.mlctitle {
color: #ededed;
font-size: 1.4em;
}

but the first declaration seems to not be "taking" perhaps because the mlctitle element is ALSO in a TD div. I'm not 100% sure on this, but the stylesheet doesn't have that many things that are that color, #1D4723.but the a:link designation appears in the stylesheet AFTER the mlctitle link and so I think overrides it. Might wantto move the a:link part up higher or see what it looks like if you comment it out or remove it completely.

Uh...okay. So, here I am trying to put together a blog, asking some of the top blogging librarians to post on it and somehow I ended up having the creater of librarian.net teaching me how to code.

Unfortunately, I had no idea what the HELL she was talking about. What the #$@&'s a "declaration"??? Yeah, I should know, I know. I've just always been bad at remembering the lingo. I don't code. I edit code I steal from other people. Don't tell on me. What's a TD div?

Lovely.

Well, about 2 seconds before I left to go home, Ruth and I discovered that the title was no longer invisible in IE. Yay! We assumed that Mac's using Firefox were okay as well. I immediately ran to Mark, rudely interruped him and thanked him for fixing the problem.

He said he didn't do anything. I guess it magically fixed itself.

By then it was after 5, and on a Friday that means fly the heck out of there as fast as you can. I went home and tried it, and title was invisible on my PC using Firefox!!!!! Within seconds I had received an email from Ruth saying it was invisible on her PC using IE. Huh?

So, at this point I had two options:

1. Beg Mark to fix it on Monday, even though he's SO busy and the blog is supposed to go live on Monday
2. Admit to Jessamyn West that I'm and idiot, a coding dunce and have no idea what she's talking about.

What would you have done? Well, Jessamyn's is a lecturer, a speaker, a teacher and a trainer, not to mention a blogger extraordinaire, so why not? I'm sure she's met dumber people than me. ...So I told her I was an idiot, basically. She was really good about it and dumbed her techie vocab down a bit, saying basically "move this thing before that thing". Well, I did it and it worked!!!

Jessamy West is my hero!!! Now, when the new blog goes live on Monday, the first post will be about my adventures, and the help of a cyber-deity to bring to life the new little blog: The Library Rebooted - Unwrapped.

Library Technology

It's been a bit, I know...and according to my poll, there is 1 person who has probably been waiting longingly for my next post, five who felt at least a bit of loss and 1 who really just doesn't give a damn. That being said, if you are actually reading this, posting a comment every once in a while isn't that bad of a thing...if nothing else, it'll give me a tiny boost of ego.

This is my first "original" post in a long time. It's so hard to actually put things into my own words that I originally read in other blogs...I mean, what's the point of rewording something when the original is worded just fine.

I fight with every ounce of my being not to become a nerdy librarian. I scoff at the title, hence why I'm an "un". When I go home at night, I don't give a second thought to OCLC's eSerials Holdings Service. The most recent QuestionPoint update has absolutely no bearing on my social life.

So, the big guy at work says I have to put together a program called Library Technologies: Blogs, Wikis, IM & More. It's one of four programs I'm currently working on. Blogs, yeah, cool. I finally gave in and started my (as it's called in the other sites that I maintain) "geeky librarian" blog. Wikis..okay, I admit that I'm a wikipedia junky, but other than that, they haven't sparked my interest all that much. It was a fun way to sign up for library camp, but that's about it...and that was WORK anyway. IM? I got over IM a long time ago. I was on...shit, what was it called? It's "the one" to be on...err...another useless acronym...ICQ, yeah, that's it..but I gave that up around 2001. Don't tell the boss, but I think it's also the best form of virtual reference (SHHHH!!!) & more...well, yeah. Thing is, I have to know what I'm talking about...so I started visiting the blogging, Wiki-er and IM-ing librarian guru peoples' blogs. I tried really hard, but I have admit that for the most part, I like them.

Ugh. I like them.

Michael Stevens, Jenny Levine, Meredith Farkas, Aaron Schmidt and my favorite, Jessamyn West...hell, I've even been reading Lorcan Dempsey's blog lately. Then, there's the Librarian's Blog to Etiquette which at first I thought was WAY too dorky for a cool person like me (sorry, Ruth!!!), but hell if it didn't somehow end up as one of my RSS feeds...still not sure how exactly that happened. I get really excited when there's a new posting on librarian.net....to the point where a few people have accused me of having a crush on its writer (Nathan, bite you tongue). I bounce at my desk when the anonymous king of etiquette posts another mean, and painfully honest assessment of the library world. My eyes instantly find the words "wiki", "blogs" and "library 2.0" from a page of words, and I ...don't tell, but I actually read it.

And here I am now. I have a television, a dvd player, tons of music, high speed internet, a quart of Butter Pecan ice cream and most importantly, MY BED, and what am I doing? I'm thinking about how it's not possible for me to be thinking about what I'm thinking about, because I'm WAY too cool to think what I'm thinking.

I think I need to follow the advice of many and lay of the caffeine and try to get more sleep.

If you'll be in the area, you should really come to my way super cool stupid dorky geeky librarian program which is just a small part of the way more super cool, wait, no...a million times more geeky five program series. We have Darlene Fichter, Jessamyn West, Meredith Farkas and Aaron Schmidt coming! I am SO excited. No, wait. I'm not, not at all. Geeky librarians.