Another reminder to feed subscribers: the new feeds are here… I would recommend subscribing to rss or rss2, and the comment feed:
https://freerangelibrarian.com/comments/feed [comments]
https://freerangelibrarian.com/feed/rss/
https://freerangelibrarian.com/feed/rss2/
https://freerangelibrarian.com/feed/rdf/
https://freerangelibrarian.com/feed/atom/
Spending a lot of time today off the grid, working on a new essay and submitting older pieces.
Several people have asked me what I thought of Steven Bell’s recent post about a lack of “rigor” in library discourse.
It’s a hard piece to discuss because its locus is undefined; it seems to be trying on arguments the way I try on clothes at Talbot’s, rushing in and out of outfits hoping to find The One. Bell opens by briefly discussing academic librarianship–with my four months of experience in that arena, I hardly feel qualified to comment–but swiftly moves on to the “penchant for pleasantry” in the “library blogosphere,” and yet a moment later we are mulling the sad state of library literature, and yet a moment later he is advising us that any discourse on electronic discussion lists is not really debate, it’s just axe-grinding–yet without a single example to buck up his argument.
There is one exception to all this glutinously sweet back-patting in the biblioblogosphere: perhaps not surprisingly, it is ACRLog, a blog for which, Bell informs us, he writes. At this point I leaned forward in my chair, hoping against hope to see a real example, a wee scrap of evidence, just one tiny bit of discussion about why ACRLog stands out–but we are suddenly in GormanGate, trying on yet another too-tight skirt.
Yes, GormanGate was controversy–but there wasn’t enough defense of Gorman for Bell’s taste. And why might that be? “… I know why. Fear of underserved and irrational reprisal.” Bell adds, “it seems increasingly the case that a speech chill has descended on the library blogosphere.”
Rerprisal–chill–hard words! Where does this come from, you ask? From what might well be called a vast, biblioblogging conspiracy, in which the “A-list library bloggers” clomp their iron fist on speech (it being so hard and so expensive to set up a blog these days) and increasingly disable comments on their blog (I find just the opposite is true).
Oddly, Bell and I are in agreement on some core issues (much as Gorman and I are equally suspicious of Google). I find far too much library literature to be a ghastly mess of flabby thought and missing evidence. We do have very poor self-image compared to other disciplines, and some of that is richly deserved. Sometimes people seem anxious about disagreement. (What was most interesting about GormanGate was that Gorman himself appeared surprised, even upset, by the blow-back… when you tell people they are semi-literate fools, shouldn’t you be just a teensy bit surprised if they choose to disagree with you?)
But overall, for an article about the dearth of rigor in scholarly bibliodiscourse, I found it a bit of a disappointment–putting it squarely in the tradition of most library literature.
This being a household-errand sort of day, I’ve been watching CNN off and on as an alternative to NPR (I loathe the Diane Rehm Show; I’m sorry, I just do) and I have heard Governor Corzine say over and over that by not wearing a seatbelt he set a bad example for young people.
Frankly–and understand, I like the guy a lot, right down to his sincere wagging beard–he set a very good example for young people. The bad example would have been if he had walked away from a high-speed car accident without a scratch and shrugged it off. Instead, he was pretty well banged up, saw the light, and expressed deep remorse, complete with tears and shaking voice.
We get to keep Corzine around a while longer, and he will now be the Buckle-Up Poster Child. A fair deal all around.
Karen Coombs and Meredith Farkas have agreed to serve on the LITA Top Technology Trends panel. Finally, I’m no longer going to be the lone woman on the dais! I also expect that Karen and Meredith will bring new perspectives to the discussion.
This is not to diss the wonderful long-distance contributions of “Librarian in Black” Sarah, who is also a Trendster, but for me the crucible is not pontificating from my digital bully pulpit, but sitting at that table next to Clifford Lynch, Eric Lease Morgan, Roy Tennant, Andrew Pace, Tom Wilson, Marshall Breeding, and others, and feeling incredibly stupid, ill-informed, panicked, and fraudulent.
Why wouldn’t I want to share that with other members of the distaff persuasion?
Superficially, in terms of library demographics, the addition of Karen and Meredith do not dramatically alter the composition of the live panel. It’s still overwhelmingly academic. However, I suspect the conversation will change, not just from the gender change but also because Karen and Meredith focus their work effort differently than the other panelists. The last panel was far too overwhelmingly focused on the ILS (my contributions included). Once a planet starts to orbit around a sun, it takes a pretty big asteroid to knock it in a new direction. I am sure Meredith and Karen can be part of that force.
A big thank you to the Top Tech Trends committee for insisting on putting the recruitment of women first and foremost. As a Trendster, I’ve been part of that push, at least from the side. But the committee chose to change things, and change it did. There are many great men who would serve this panel well, but that can happen some other time.
Ladies, I’m holding you to this commitment if I have to fly to your respective cities and escort you by hand! (Though somehow I suspect this won’t be necessary.)
Reminder to feed subscribers: the new feeds are here… I would recommend subscribing to rss or rss2, and the comment feed:
https://freerangelibrarian.com/comments/feed [comments]
https://freerangelibrarian.com/feed/rss/
https://freerangelibrarian.com/feed/rss2/
https://freerangelibrarian.com/feed/rdf/
https://freerangelibrarian.com/feed/atom/
You can find almost as many opinions of Dreamhost as there are users, but for the four years I’ve used them, they’ve been fine. Once in a while the tech support is a little slow to respond, but if I wanted them at my beck and call, I’d try a plan priced higher than what I pay, which is less than $10 a month for a pile of services, from one-click installs of WordPress and other software to web stats to very decent domain support.
I wrote Dreamhost on Saturday evening to report problems with my redirects. Didn’t hear from them Sunday; that’s fine, I didn’t say it was a major crisis. But this morning there was a message in my box saying that they agreed mod_rewrite wasn’t working in my blog’s directory and they had set up redirects from Apache themselves, and here’s what they did and was that ok and did I need anything else…
Everybody go awwwwww.
Honestly, when what you get from a low-cost service is largely unremarkable because it works, and stands out when you get help, and they’re friendly to boot: that’s good business.
I located the path for this blog’s comment feed: https://freerangelibrarian.com/comments/feed
To follow the conversation on the posts to this blog, subscribe to this feed as well as to (at least one of) the feeds listed in the post before this. I would like to link to that post, except I would like to make sure I’m using the correct relative path before I do so, and I haven’t sussed that out to my complete satisfaction.
I found a great tweak for the RSS comment feed that fixed something I find aggravating: when you subscribe to posts and comments, the WordPress comment feed isn’t listed next to the post, because the comment feed is named “Comments for” instead of “[Your blog]’s Comments.” Everything may be Miscellaneous, but a good list is hard to find; and darn it, if my blog’s posts and comments can’t be married, at least they should be able to register as domestic partners.
You have to be willing to modify a core file for WordPress to fix this, but if you have shell access , you can use pico or some other editor, and you know the Unix cp command, you should be fine. At the worst, with the original file copied for safekeeping, you can put it back the way it was.
Meanwhile, my .htaccess file has the air of a desperate novice flailing around. I used the suggested mod_rewrite routine, but I was getting a huge number of 404 errors related to feeds, so I added run-of-the-mill redirects. This reminds me a little of a crockpot soup I once made where I kept adding ingredients… canned tomatoes, sauerkraut, piles of herbs… until it was a huge, steaming cauldron of inedible errors.
I’ve left off a section that WordPress added after my pile of stuff, but here’s what I’ve tried so far… anything obviously stupid (or even stupid in a subtle, sotto voce manner)? I’m using Dreamhost and followed their mod_rewrite suggestions.
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule archives/0*(\d+).html https://freerangelibrarian.com/index.php?p=$1
RewriteRule index.rdf https://freerangelibrarian.com/index.php?feed=rdf
RewriteRule index.rss https://freerangelibrarian.com/index.php?feed=rss
RewriteRule index.xml https://freerangelibrarian.com/index.php?feed=rss2
RewriteRule preferredrss2feedforFRL.xml https://freerangelibrarian.com/index.php?feed=rss2
#hmmm… still seeing errors… let me try redirects
Redirect index.rdf https://freerangelibrarian.com/index.php?feed=rdf
Redirect index.rss https://freerangelibrarian.com/index.php?feed=rss
Redirect index.xml https://freerangelibrarian.com/index.php?feed=rss2
Redirect atom.xml https://freerangelibrarian.com/index.php?feed=atom
Finally, if you noticed some SQL screen barf (way down on the right sidebar), I had tried to implement a plugin called Top Commentators which did not work. Top Commentators works… though I am not crazy about the formatting, it’s still pretty fun. I’m setting up a test blog on another domain (separate database, even) where I’ll install problem plugins and futz with them there.
I am trying to get the old feed files to point to the new files…it worked fine in test, but in real life… well, let’s just say the 404 traffic is brisk. Anyway, if you’d rather unsub and resub, just use these files (rss2 for most of you, atom for Walter :g:):
https://freerangelibrarian.com/feed/
https://freerangelibrarian.com/feed/rss/
https://freerangelibrarian.com/feed/rss2/
https://freerangelibrarian.com/feed/rdf/
https://freerangelibrarian.com/feed/atom/
WordPress has separate feeds for comments, but I am a bit stumped about the URL.
Anyway, aside from the comment feed and some redirect issues, the migration seems to have gone very well. Hello, WordPress!
I’m reinstalling Free Range Librarian into WordPress blogging software–at long last! Here’s a partial repost of what I said earlier today:
Sometime today or tomorrow (the weekend of April 28/29, 2007), this blog, Free Range Librarian, will disappear, then… hopefully… reappear.
Subscribers, note that I am going to do everything possible to redirect the feeds to the new feed URLs (which, WordPress-style, will be two feeds, one for posts and one for comments… though I’d like a third feed for both). However, if you don’t see a new post at least every day for the next week, effective Monday, April 30, 2007, check the blog itself, or at worst, contact me at kgs at bluehighways dot com to ask what the heck happened.
Sometime today or tomorrow (the weekend of April 28/29, 2007), this blog, Free Range Librarian, will disappear, then… hopefully… reappear.
Subscribers, note that I am going to do everything possible to redirect the feeds to the new feed URLs (which, WordPress-style, will be two feeds, one for posts and one for comments… though I’d like a third feed for both). However, if you don’t see a new post in your favorite reader at least once a day for the next week, effective Monday, April 30, 2007, check the blog itself, or at worst, contact me at kgs at bluehighways dot com to ask what the heck happened.
I spent most of last night and this morning in that happy zen heaven of iterative testing. Today I noticed I was having trouble logging in to the Movable Type installation and that, once in, everything was very slow. I don’t know if that’s coincidental (MT has become more and more sluggish the larger my blog has become), or it’s related to the WordPress test blog running on a subdirectory. In either case, it’s clearly time to move (especially since Sandy is away at a conference and therefore not able to grab me by the scruff of the neck and make me go outside into First Life…).
The WordPress theme I’m going to use is a very plain three-column liquid layout with Widget support. I saw other layouts that had more “shazamm,” but they required design changes that would have held up migration while I fiddled with replacing images and so forth–all the skill sets I’m not that motivated to develop. I decided to live with a plain design for now (even if it invokes the mocking scorn of some functionary at the Big O, as happened some time ago), and hope the right theme comes into my life later on. (The theme looks less than wonderful on IE7, but it’s not hideous, just a little stupid-looking.)
I concentrated instead on learning how to configure WordPress and testing plugins for functionality I want available on rollout (with sidebar Widgets primary, since fiddling with sidebars was a timesink on Movable Type I knew I didn’t want to get into). Out of the box, I wanted easy-to-read URLs, a clean, plain print-page function, a Flickr display, “Now Reading” plugins, recent comments, social bookmark links, and a few internal thingies related to caching and whatnot.
I have all the plugins ready to reinstall into the “real” installation, I know how I want them configured, and I am hip to any little tweaks to make them work better. So instead of importing posts and THEN adding plugin on top of plugin, tweak on top of tweak, the order of battle is:
* Make sure I have one full MySQL backup of my posts and two MT export files, one full and one split*
* Set up new, tasty, fresh MySQL database and user, just for this installation
* Install WordPress (thank you for one-click installation, Dreamhost!)
* Upload .htaccess file with new archive and feed paths
* Configure URLs, admin users, other basic tasks
* Select theme
* Add and configure plugins
* Test posting, commenting, editing
* Import old posts
* Test feeds and archives
* Test all functions
* Announce and pray
* Celebrate with a chocolate-covered marshmallow heart and a wee tot of Glenlivet!
* I had already exported my FRL posts last week and successfully imported them into a test blog, and after exporting twice and doing a MySQL backup, will follow Jay Datema’s advice and also export FRL’s data as split files, Just In Case.
As an aside, backing up MySQL is one of those things I can do much easier from a shell command, simply because I have a tried-and-true cheat sheet from which I just copy and paste, whereas in PhpMyAdmin, I have to figure out what the commands Really Do.
It feels good to be puttering with this task. I had made the decision to move to WordPress some time ago, but other things intervened last November, and once I fell into the rabbit-hole of FPOW, I did not have the sustained quality time, energy, or intellectual focus to plan and test a migration. My personal life was a bug caught in amber. This time around I’m going to acknowledge that whatever new work I get will keep me extremely busy for a while–maybe a very long while.
Busy, I can do busy: as Sandy observed this week, I was perfectly happy while balancing an MFA with the demands of my Former Place of Work Minus 1 (FPOW-1). If you’re not doing what you love, every minute is slow agony. If you’re doing what you love, it feels like play. (Remind me of that if I’m up at 3 a.m. trying to get this blog working again, all right?)
This just arrived at 5 p.m. today, a few hours after I was on Open Source Radio providing librarian color (alongside Tim Spalding, who provided… thingology color?) for an interview with David Weinberger. I probably wasn’t that interesting, since I agree with David on many points, though I still see uses for controlled vocabularies while David is way out there with leveraging the wisdom of crowds and community-as-author, etc.
I’ll get cracking on it tonight–I’ve read the prologue, and I’m eager to dig into the whole book!
