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Recently I’ve been importing the ancient Librarian Avengers archives to live within WordPress. Because the site goes back to…hrm… 1997, there’s some data munging to do.

Right now I’m concerning myself with the period after Graduate School, when I moved to Ithaca, NY for an ostensibly-cool digital library fellowship. I couldn’t talk about how much I hated it at the time so the entries are mostly tangential to the work I was doing, but there’s still some fun stuff.

Importing ancient blog posts involves a bunch of tagging, titling, category-setting, and general modernization. I’ve been progressively making my way through the old posts, adding images, fixing spelling mistakes, and generally adding a bit of polish.

Part of the reason I’m taking on data scrubbing as my One Designated Personal Thing to Do this evening, is that today has been a study in helplessness. My daughter has a (small) fever. It’s the first time she’s been sick, and I’m trying to direct my need to control something (anything!) in a positive direction.

Also, cleaning data is pretty therapeutic after some of the body fluids I’ve encountered recently.

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Children’s book illustrators,  like all artists, can reach their markets and audiences more easily than ever before, thanks to the Internet!

And I believe that WordPress, the open source content management system is one of the best ways to establish a presence on the web.

Erik Kuntz, designer, web consultant, instructor and web comic artist feels the same way I do about WordPress. Except he knows tons more about it than I do.  He consults with small businesses and big companies on this stuff.  (He’s also the intrepid webmaster of our Austin, Texas SCBWI chapter.)

Erik (standing, right) is joined by Austin illustrators and writers Don Tate, Christy Stallop, Amy Farrier, Torran Anderson, Louise Shelby, Ross Carnes and Martin Thomas.

A couple of weeks ago he conducted a special online workshop session for my Make Your Marks; Make Your Splashes class.

He did a brilliant presentation, showing us different ways to put up our illustration galleries on our WordPress blogs.  By galleries  I mean the tiny thumbnail pictures you click on to see much larger higher res versions of them.  After showing us a trick for doing it on WordPress.com blogs, he showed us how to do it on our WordPress.org blogs using the free plug-in, NextGen Gallery.

Alas, things do not always work out perfectly.  The recording did not take.

We were all so counting on the replay.  Erik shared so much with us that it was hard to get it all down in our notes!  I did what I had to:  Asked him if he’d be willing to walk us through the workshop again.

He agreed to — characteristically, because he’s a helpful soul.

So we’re doing the same w

WordPress.com has grown into one of the most amazing cloud architectures in the world. This has enabled blogs hosted here to have features unavailable on self-hosted WordPress installs. This makes us sad, since here at WordPress.com we want every WordPress install everywhere to be amazing.

In this spirit, we have great news. We are now making the power of WordPress.com available to almost all WordPress blogs, regardless of where they are hosted.

With Jetpack, a new plugin from Automattic, people not on WordPress.com can now access features that depend on WordPress.com. Jetpack also provides convenience features that don’t use the cloud, but are now easier to install, or were unavailable as plugins before.

To start, go to http://jetpack.me and read the backstory from Matt on why Jetpack is so important for WordPress.

(Mozilla Jetpack is a wonderful, but entirely unrelated, open source project run by Mozilla Labs. We checked with them first and we’re mutually cool on the use of the name.)

New illustrative website design and build for a water chlorination company in Shropshire: Water Clean Services Ltd.

Completely customised and original design. A content management website based on open source content management system Wo

Some minor changes to the header.php and a new template for a portfolio index added.

Download the updated theme in the resources section.

Copyright © 2010

This is a little update to what I’ve been doing in the past months involving art, WordPress,  coding and life in general. There’s a few links to useful things I’ve found recently as well.

I now have a new part time job which I am enjoying very much: it’s easily the best job I’ve ever had, and am also in the process of getting ready to move to another area of the country to be with my fiancé. Lets just say life is looking a lot better than it was 2 years ago. I may write a post/essay on that one day if I have nothing better to do with my time (perhaps not then).

I took up my martial arts and yoga again over the past 2 years and sorted a few things out with my confidence and fitness in general which hopefully will one day reflect on my artwork. I can nearly kick my head again, but not quite.

I’ve also been working since last year on a WordPress CMS website project and a picture book project to keep my skills up and learn new things. I will go into more detail as the projects develop later in the year.

Here’s a few useful things I found on the inter-web recently for you as you’ve read this far:

Useful WordPress plugins

PHPEnkoder (automatically encrypts emails on web page to stop email spam)

WP-Cycle (J Query image slide show)

Members (I’m keeping my eye on this one, looks very promising for user management)

Free Software

Backup tool, FreeFileSync (useful for flash drives and secondary hard drive backup)

Password manager, KeePass

I’ve been scooting around a little bit lately and here are some things that have been crossing my virtual desk. I’ve also dealt with two wordpress issues [a hack! and an outdated sidebar navigation element] and I’ve upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. If you’re on a Summer schedule, I’d suggest upgrading before things get hectic.

• A small and to the point help save our library blog from the William Leonard Public Library in Robbins Illinois. More about their library’s financial crisis.
• Ralph has some space for a new library at the Canadian Aerospace Warfare Center and no idea how to do it. He’s built a little wiki. maybe people have advice?
• Bernie Margolis, now the State Librarian of NY after leading Boston Public Library for a long time, is quoted in a library Journal article saying that ALA and its allies should be stepping up to demand more library access for the scanned books that will be made available via the Google Books Settlement, if and when that happens.
• LSW fundraiser for the LFPL, one week left. Don’t know what those acronyms are? Click the link!

This post is going to be random and all over the place- you have been warned.

I thought using WordPress would save me time to paint more but I have become more than a little obsessed with it.

I’ve been really busy working on a web site project for a local Parish Council as well as tweaking my web site some more (I know I should stop at some point), so I haven’t done that much painting lately.

I can’t show the Parish Council website yet because it hasn’t been officially launched yet, but I’ve really learned a lot from working on it.

I have also been learning a lot more about web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG). It is very interesting thinking about how many people may view one web page in a different way. I’ve implemented many of the techniques on this web site and the Parish Council project I’m working on.  I’ll have to write up an accessibility statement at some point I guess.

Yesterday I went to the Festival of Quilts ¹ at Birmingham International with my aunt and mum. There were loads of really beautiful arty quilts everywhere and I had a good time looking at all the buttons and beads. I might be inspired to do some more sock monkeys at some point. There was one thing in the whole place that really caught my eye- it was a Korean exhibit: Chunghie Lee: Pojagi & Beyond – My Cup Overflows, I just thought it was beautiful.

Today I mowed the lawns and saved a butterfly.

Now for tea.

ibrarian?

Data junkie? Obsessive compulsive? Come to the Freebase hack day on July 11, 2009 here in SF. There’s food, drinks, an excellent network, plenty of powercords, and a nice room full of geeks to chat with.

It’s a fun way to dive a bit deeper into making cool data mashups, relationally documenting your brain contents, and getting your questions answered by actually standing in front of Metaweb developers and staring at them until they make go.

Drop me a note if you are going. :)

-Erica

So I’ve decided to switch to ProgPress by Jason Penny as my Wordpress plugin (see my right-hand navigation bar, partway down the page) because I can list multiple writing projects within the same widget.

I avoided the plugin at first because (at first glance, at least), it looked more complicated than the other choices, plus the user documentation needs a bit of help. However, I like the flexibility and customization possibilities of this app. Here’s a quickie tutorial on how you can use it for your own Wordpress blog:

1. Download the plugin.

2. Activate the plugin (Appearance -> Widgets).

3. Adjust the settings to what you want (Settings -> ProgPress):

Here are the settings I used to show the progress bars in a text widget. I’m assuming that checking “Display in posts” will add the bars to ever blog post, which I didn’t want.

Here’s what I put in the text widget:

I couldn’t figure out what that third numeric field was for. It’s labelled as “PreviousCount” but it didn’t seem to have any effect so I just put “xxx.” I’m going to e-mail Jason for info.

I’ve haven’t done much customizing yet (colour, size of bar, etc.), plus I’ll probably add some text at the top of the widget with a link to the graphic novel blog I maintain with Beckett Gladney.

And you can see the results at the top of this page. Um, I haven’t started the rewrite of my new sf/fantasy novel yet.

Anyway, it wasn’t as complicated as I had anticipated. If you’re still intimidated by the above, however, you may want to stick with a plugin like the Scribometer, though it currently only supports one project at a time.

I spent Friday at the NELA-ITS CMS Day. I gave the keynote in the morning, just talking about what CMSes are and why they’re useful with a little overview of a few, and then hung out to see other librarians talk about how they’re using their CMSes. It was a great day. We had a wonderful, if chilly, room at the lovely Portsmouth Public Library and I learned a lot about how some New England area libraries are running their library websites with Drupal, Joomla, Plone and Wordpress.

Having the actual people behind these websites talking about what worked and what didn’t work — and people were very candid about what was good and bad about these CMSes — made for a fascinating day of show and tell. Add to this the fact that all the software demonstrated was free and open source and I really think we sent people away with some great ideas on how to save money and still deliver good web content. Not having the chilling effect of a vendor’s stink-eye [or lawsuit threat] was also delightful. I’m now done with public speaking stuff until October I believe. Glad to end this season on such an up note. Thanks to NELA-ITS and Brian Herzog for coming up with the idea in the first place. Notes for my talks — links to slides and a page of links to what i was talking about, are here: Website 2.0! why there is a CMS in your future. Thanks to everyone for showing up. Here are the links to other people’s presentations and websites.

“The My Kansas Library on the Web project is an attempt to allow small public libraries across the state have access to high end web-based tools to facilitate easy web development.

Translation: It’s a way to make your library’s website all that it can be and more by giving you easy to use tools that are accessible from ANYWHERE there is an Internet connection.” Smart project and attractive and easy-to-use site from the Kansas Regional Library Systems and the State Library of Kansas.

Hi — I just upgraded my WordPress install and along with it, removed some old crusty plugins that I don’t think I was using anymore. If you come across something that is broken or working worse than it was this morning, please drop me a line or a comment and let me know. Thank you.

I’m using a Firefox plugin called Scribefire to post this. Apparently I’m too lazy to fire up WordPress and write something for you guys, but if the text box is sitting at the bottom of my browser screen, I’m happy to start writing.

Usability. Go figure.

I spend every day trying to figure out little brain hacks like this, to make it easier for folks to use software.

We are such silly monkeys.

Firefox plugin for quick posting to Wordpress: Scribefire (thanks Jessamyn!)

Erica said, on 7/15/2008 10:35:00 AM

I’m using a Firefox plugin called Scribefire to post this. Apparently I’m too lazy to fire up WordPress and write something for you guys, but if the text box is sitting at the bottom of my browser screen, I’m happy to start writing.

Usability. Go figure.

I spend every day trying to figure out little brain hacks like this, to make it easier for folks to use software.

We are such silly monkeys.

Firefox plugin for quick posting to Wordpress: Scribefire (thanks Jessamyn!)

I had some free time this afternoon in my office. I also had a bigger box of books than I had the first time. And, well, for those of you who do not know me so well, idle time is not a good thing for me to have a lot of. If you did not take a moment to click the link above, it zips on over to the entry I did a few weeks back where I built a small towers with my books and culminated with a 20 book domino question mark that I managed to snap a few photos of.

That was nothing.

This time I had 85 books...and a video camera.

Here is the counter run:


Here is the death defying drop:


Here is the hairpin turn past the uber-cool wiggly mirrors:


Here is the home stretch:


And here is the grand finale: the double diamond!!!


Now for your viewing pleasure, enjoy the Big Slick Domino Extravaganza!

<Parents, you may want to have your children leave the room as too much excitement could get their humours in a boil!>



***And to all you librarians and book-lovers out there: no books were hurt in the making of this production (with the exception of a tiny tear on one single dust jacket)***