Chocolatespoon: Emily’s Musings

I got my blog back!!! I missed being able to blog and it is SO nice to have it back! I have lots of days to catch up on and will get right to work trying to post some of the things. Yay!!!

Mom and Bill were here for the weekend. Mom and I went shopping, I ducked out for a few hours to teach a blogging class at the Gilroy Library, and then Saturday night Margaret and Alan came up here and we all went out to dinner at Ragoots.

Sunday we went into SF and met up with Lisa and John who were visiting for a friend’s 60th birthday party and the 6 of us went to see the Picasso exhibit at SFMOMA. It was super crowded but a really interesting exhibit where they really showed the amazing influence he had on American artists. Then we met up with Barbara and Richard at Samovar, my favorite SF tea restaurant (where I had just been the week before when a couple of us from work went up to the Web 2.0 Expo) and really one of my favorite spots anywhere.

I am getting my server migrated (hopefully soon!) and then will have more server space and bandwidth (it keeps crashing because I’ve overused my bandwidth — probably because people keep linking to my pictures) and then I will finally upgrade my blogging software (fingers crossed) to something a bit more stable as well.

I got my blog back!!! I missed being able to blog and it is SO nice to have it back! I have lots of days to catch up on and will get right to work trying to post some of the things. Yay!!!

Mom and Bill were here for the weekend. Mom and I went shopping, I ducked out for a few hours to teach a blogging class at the Gilroy Library, and then Saturday night Margaret and Alan came up here and we all went out to dinner at Ragoots.

Sunday we went into SF and met up with Lisa and John who were visiting for a friend’s 60th birthday party and the 6 of us went to see the Picasso exhibit at SFMOMA. It was super crowded but a really interesting exhibit where they really showed the amazing influence he had on American artists. Then we met up with Barbara and Richard at Samovar, my favorite SF tea restaurant (where I had just been the week before when a couple of us from work went up to the Web 2.0 Expo) and really one of my favorite spots anywhere.

I am getting my server migrated (hopefully soon!) and then will have more server space and bandwidth (it keeps crashing because I’ve overused my bandwidth — probably because people keep linking to my pictures) and then I will finally upgrade my blogging software (fingers crossed) to something a bit more stable as well.

Sadly, I broke my blog and can’t add any new items (plus all the search, comment and other features are broken). I’m trying to get it fixed, but that is why there haven’t been any updates posted for quite a while. I’m alive and well, and will try to catch up when the files are all restored.

Here are my notes for today’s presentation on blogging… to give it some structure, I decided to do an A-Z approach, but that leads to some odd entries. I also decided to use all my animal photos from the trip (and to fill in with random landscape ones with I hit letters that I didn’t have animals for).

pdf version for downloading

Update: Back from the presentation, which was a lot of fun (a few technical glitches of course, but I managed to get through the slides and then show off some of the web sites afterwards). Here’s a photo of the group from the end:

I ended up zapping all the site’s comments since there were 32k+ spam ones (not here, but on some other sites that I host) and things were so corrupted I couldn’t seem to delete them. I hate to lose all the nice comments, but that may be the price of the spam (and yes, one day I really will upgrade MT to filter them… sigh)

Notes from Day 3 of Internet Librarian 2006

More raw notes from the conference… to be filled in further later…

Morning Keynote: Shari Thurow
Search Friendly Web Design
an engaging speaker, but a topic too focused for a keynote

• user-friendly web site design that can be easily found on both the crawler-based and human-based search engines
• 5 Basic Rules of Web Design: Easy to Read, Easy to Navigate (provides ‘sense of place’ and ‘scent of information’), Easy to Find (externally and internally), Consistent in Layout & Design, and Quick to Fownload
  people will click as long as they believe they’re making progress
  search engines as 3rd browser
• Search Engines do 3 things: index text, follow links, measure popularity
  if you do not place text on your pages and create a site navigation scheme that crawlers can follow, your library site will not rank well in the search engines
  need high quality links from 3rd parties
• Primary Text: title tags, visible body copy, text at top of page, in and around hypertext links
• Secondary Text: meta-tag content, alternative text, domain and file name
• MPABS: “most people are basically stupid” – you have to tell people what you want them to do on your site
• site map should provide context, have an intro paragraph
• Yahoo + Wikipedia = good high-quality links to get
• glossaries and dictionaries – especially illustrated glossaries – are good for rankings
• Gerald Spool, usability expert
• cross-linking

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Day 2 of the Internet Librarian conference, more hits and misses, but generally a good day (ending with cookies, which can redeem most any conference)

S dropped my off (since Monterey isn’t all that far from Salinas and since I was going to stay over so it was silly to have my car) and I was there nice and early to do my work remotely before the first sessions only to find that the wireless wasn’t working and there was no staff there yet to deal with it. So I went up the street to Starbucks and camped out there for a while.

First up was the presentation of the Mashing Up the Library competition, won by my old SHS classmate John Blyberg (who I tracked down later at the exhibit hall and said hello — see photo)

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This is a test of blogging from my Treo! I’m so excited about being able to blog now from pretty much anywhere. Typing on this is going to take a bunch more practice…

Here’s my raw notes from day one of the internet librarian conference. Trish has a whole blog with her notes.

Apparently there are about 1415 people participating in the conference (1250 paid attendees for the sessions), 48 states and the District of Columbia are represented (not sure why there were no people from Deleware or Mississippi), and from 9 other countries. There are 130 speakers and moderators presenting.

Keynote: J.A. Jance was the keynote speaker. Apparently not only does she blog but the character in her book Edge of Evil blogs as well. It was a funny and interesting (if completely unrelated to the conference) talk, and she sang the Janice Ian song “At 17” and did The Last Blues Song (complete with the “Woh-woh-woh-woh-woh-woh-woh-woh”) as an encore!
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I’m at the Internet Librarian 2006 conference in Monterey (mon-wed). There’s wireless in the lobby, so I’ll probably be able to provide a few updates now and then. I’m really looking forward to seeing people I know (Hi Trish, Hi Kelley), people whose blogs I read regularly, and all sorts of new people!

If you’re here too, let me know!