Speaking of RSS…

Speaker Badge

I will be giving my first national presentation next month at the Computers in Libraries conference in Washington DC. I am in the B track on day one, Monday, March 21 from 4:15-5 pm, Drupal Basics and more.

My part of the session will cover Drupal, but the focus is on using RSS with your website, be it html or Drupal. How to cover that in 25 minutes, give or take? Come and find out. I promise the notes will also be up on slide share after the conference.

Scrolling with the iPad

Thanks to a stray comment from the wonderful learnbythedrop.com drupal site (managing drupal sites with an iPad), I now have the solution to my biggest pet peeve with the iPad: its inability to scroll embedded content areas within pages such as iframes.

Since I use iframes on the library website that I manage in the form of a list of events via yahoo pipes, this has been a sore point for me every time I visit this page.

The answer is so simple I’m amazed I didn’t figure it out on my own: use two fingers to scroll the affected area.

Five things I would ask for if Steve Jobs were Santa Claus

Dear Santa Steve,

I have been a faithful mac customer since I bought my first personal computer in 1997, a reject Quadra 640  that the local walmart had used to inventory their electronics section until one day the hard drive corrupted and it wouldn’t boot. Fortunately my boyfriend and future husband knew a thing or two about macs and hard drives and in no time he had it back up and running.

Over the years I have stayed true through three laptops, four desktops, and now own a MacBook, a MacMini (say hello) an iphone, ipad, and a couple of ipod nanos of the long, rectangular shape. I remain, as ever, a devotee of all things apple. I have an apple sticker on my car’s back windshield.

As a true mac fan(atic), I would like to suggest a few minor things about your itunes product that I think would make it a superior product:

1. Individual sync records for devices.

I don’t understand why programs I purchase on and for my ipad are automatically transferred when possible to my iphone and vice versa. There are programs I will never use on my ipad the same way (if ever) that I would use them on my phone. Surely as the consumer I should get to say what I want on each device, rather than having to reorganize my icons because things I didn’t want just showed up one day and filled up all the free spaces.

2. Bookmarks in Itunes

I love the itunes radio and itunes store, and sometimes I would like to mark how much I liked a station, or that I found an app I would like to get back to. For music you have a wish list. Can you add apps to that please? Can you create a tagging system for radio stations so I know which ones I have listened to before and which ones I liked?  I can introduce you to a great product called Netflix so you can see how it’s done.

3. Album organization by default

I know someone out there, perhaps you Santa Steve, must organize their music by artist, but I have always organized my music by album, with subcategorization by genre and perhaps even by mood. I mention this because once again i have had to painstakingly copy and reorganize an entire album because itunes would like to organize the 23 tracks on the BVS Once More With Feeling Soundtrack by at least 22 unique artist combinations.

4. Family sharing

I can authorize five devices for my itunes account. As you notice in the list above, I currently own four devices. This means I can authorize my account (with my purchased movies and music) on only one extra device that my husband might use. My husband is even more strapped since between work computers and home and peripheral devices, he is unable to authorize any more devices, including our television computer, so when we want to watch the House episodes he bought, we have to unhook the mac mini from the tv and hook up his ipad. Home sharing does not allow me to access his purchased items because I’m not authorized… Authorized users…. it would be nice to think about.

5. Skins

Really. In System 7 I could make my window frame and every part of my mac a seamless bubble of individualized elegance. In OSX I get the Model A version: it comes in any color you like as long as you like chrome.

 

Anyway,

Merry Macmas from one mac fan to another. I love my ipad very much.

–

 

 

 

Ux progress

Still plodding my way through the wonderful steps outlined in The Elements of User Experience.(Preordered the 2010 edition from Amazon) Met with my committee late last month and went over some card sorting routines. What I discovered was every member of my committee looks at information differently.

The “love it hate it” reviews brought a wealth of information, including the fact that different members of my committee loved and hated the same things. My committee was not chosen because everyone expressed an interest in the website. Some members are on there because a boss felt it would be a good experience, or because they needed an extra committee. So I like to think of them as my random sampling.

Would our website be better if we only had people on it who actually liked the web? Maybe, but we might also overlook the technophobic population who will probably turn to websites like ours as their first foray into the world of the web when they are required to get things like tax forms online, or social security or unemployment.

Libraries: the gateway to the www.

Published!

My first professional article was published this month in Computers in Libraries magazine. (July/August 2010).

The article looks great, but it seems a very small amount of space to compress into the lessons learned from a year using RSS, Engaged Patrons and Yahoo Pipes.

If anyone is here because of that article, feel free to leave comments, questions, whatever. I’ll do my best to help flesh out the process.

Questions for candy

I don’t know about other libraries, but our reference desk is underused. I discovered recently my branch is the only one in our system that has a reference desk, and ours is only staffed a couple of hours in the afternoon and evenings.

So part of the issue may be that people come in and get used to seeing no one there, and when someone is there they appear to be hard at work… uninterruptible.

So what could we try to boost interest…

– Ask one question per day, get a piece of candy. (Mint, etc.)

– Every question goes into  a weekly drawing for a small prize (bookmark, pen, free used book from the book sale)

– Try to ask our Reference Question of the Month – get a bigger prize and your question featured on our wall of awesomeness… (which could become a page on our website also!)

I hate to come up with something like ‘try to stump the librarian for a prize’ because it can so easily be done if you catch a person who is already busy or not feeling 100 percent.

And also because competitions of that nature seem to attract a certain type of people, ones who have decided in advance they are going to try to make themselves feel better by making you look/feel dumb. That’s the last thing anyone needs to encourage.

Open the competition to more than just the physical world. “Send us your reference question by email / by twitter / on facebook.”

Make the prizes kinda goofy, kinda cool. There was a database company (Salem Press) offering some buttons in the past at conferences that read “Reference is Cool.” Maybe they could send a batch. Maybe we could use our button press to make our own. There’s always cafe press as well.

Good information is priceless, but bulk hard candy is cheap.

More good library blogs

http://salempress.com/Store/blogs/blog_home.htm

Salem Press, with whom I deal marginally because our library’s print purchase yielded us a free perk of a rather nice health database (Salem Health), has announced the winners of their Library Blog contest. They requested nominations by email and narrowed the 400 suggestions down to 104 candidates, then divided them into five categories and named the best three.

There’s some titles I recognize and others I’ve never read. Time to check out some new material.