Assignment 4

Assignment 4 with Carey Huddleston and Brian Adams is complete.
Thank you to both of my partners for a great collaborative experience.

Home Stretch

My group is almost done with our paper.  Some of my friends giggled at me when I told them the topic was mobile devices and library services, since the only mobile device I own is a refurbished first generation iPod nano. It's a good thing we can learn all we need from journal articles.

Trends to Watch Slide Show

This is a fun slide show that came out at the beginning of 2012.  A few of the more interesting slides:

13: Cloud Security Alliance - ties into our topic this week about the pros and cons of cloud computing.

51: Social Media at the Olympics - Athletes are allowed to use social media during the games this year.  We should get real time updates about how they feel.

57: Public Bookshelves: - because anything about the public lending of books relates to libraries.

http://www.slideshare.net/jwtintelligence/jwt-100-things-to-watch-in-2011-10669904

Assignment 3

I contacted the Greenville County Library System (GCLS) in South Carolina about their Joomla website, and they put me in touch with their Web Developer, Brian Dykes.  He has been working for GCLS for two years, and their website has been running on Joomla for three years.  Brian has more than a decade’s worth of experience designing for websites, both commercial and non-profit.  He kindly answered my interview questions by email:

How and where did you hear about Content Management Systems and Joomla?

In all honesty, I was a hardcore custom coder before coming to the GCLS.  I had never even heard of Joomla in 2010 when I was interviewed for the position I now hold.  I was only vaguely familiar with CMSs.

What were your motivations to adopt Joomla for your library website?

From my understanding, the GCLS chose Joomla for because the Web Developer at the time was somewhat familiar with it.  Also, it being linux-based, open source (read: Free) and widely used (free support) were other attractive features that led to our selecting it.  My guess is that the other two (Drupal & Wordpress) were either too technical and/or not fully functional to fit our needs at the time.

What were your decision making criteria?

See 2^nd answer above.

What are the important benefits or advantages of Joomla over your previous website? Did you use a different CMS in the past or was it strictly html?

Before using Joomla, our site was created/maintained using HTML & Javascript.  Advantages with Joomla (any CMS) would be ease of maintenance, automated scheduling of events/programs (start/stop publish times), and even though we don’t use the feature, the ability to allow non-technical staffers to post information pertinent to their positions and/or units.

How was the learning curve?

There was a slight learning curve with Joomla.  I’d say it took me about a week to change my mindset to “understand” how (why?) Joomla was the way it is. IMO, Joomla tends to make some fairly sophisticated tasks very easy to implement.  By that same token, it often takes something fairly simple and makes it more difficult than it needs to be.  My suspicion is that anyone coding websites nowadays wouldn’t have too much trouble.

Which extensions/plugins were most useful for creating content for your library?

Current version of website relies on Mosets Tree plugin (for databases), mod_swfobject (for Flash), DJ ImageSlider (new additions widget) and DOCman for housing/organizing our online publications (FOIA & BOT stuff, job postings, policies etc.)

Did you create a custom template or adapt an existing template?

The previous Web Developer created a very basic, somewhat fragile and limited template that we’ve been using for the past few years.  Although I’ve “enhanced” it a bunch, it still leaves a lot to be desired. That being said, we are currently redesigning our site and have purchased a nice looking, fully-featured template that should help us along quite a bit.  We dabbled with the idea of creating one from scratch but for less than $70, this approach seemed hard to beat.  So far, so good.

What is the best advice you can give a library just getting started with Joomla?

KEEP IT SIMPLE.  At least at first.  Only use tried & true extensions/mods that have been out for a loooooong time with hundreds of users in real settings.  Make sure in addition to having someone well-versed in HTML/Javascript/PHP as the developer, that you have someone very knowledgeable at the server level that can help with those types of things.  Without our network administrators, I’d be in rough shape.

Reflection

Brian Dykes’ answers mostly followed my own experience, especially his comment that “Joomla tends to make some fairly sophisticated tasks very easy to implement.  By that same token, it often takes something fairly simple and makes it more difficult than it needs to be.”  I also related to having to change your mindset when you come from a traditional web design background.  The advantages of Joomla are in creating complicated information interfaces such as the Moset’s Tree plugin for databases (I’ve used Sobipro which is a competitor to Moset’s Tree), but sometimes there are things that you could so easily code in HTML that become difficult when trying to recreate them in Joomla (such as only showing particular parts of a menu). 

I was surprised by his answer that his system is choosing to purchase a template.  The price is certainly reasonable, but my own experience with templates was not being able to find one that fit our library, especially since we needed different looks for different departments such as the Children’s Area and Teen Scene.  I have put many hours into learning how Joomla templates work, learning enough PHP to get by, and creating graphics, that I know my system’s redesign would have been finished much sooner if we used an off the shelf template. I also know what he means by “fragile.”  I would have a template exactly how I wanted it only to find one little module would throw everything off, and I’d have to make more custom classes.  

I know that in this class, our exercise in creating a Joomla site was supposed to show how easy it is for a non-coder to make a site, but I think Brian is right.  While Joomla allows non-coders to update their sections and participate in creating web content, the person who manages the site should be “well-versed in HTML/Javascript/PHP.”  I can’t image setting up some of the plug-ins I’ve added to our site without knowing some PHP.  Everything has to be tweaked to work together.  I think that even as systems like Joomla become more widely adopted, library systems will still need web developers on staff.

Joomla Reflection

I was happy to hear we'd be working with Joomla for this class, because it's the CMS I know the best. I've dabbled with Drupal and Wordpress, but Joomla is the system I have experience in building websites. After signing up with Cloudacess, I started by deleting or un-publishing all of the sample menus and articles to clear the clutter. I like to make a site menu first so I can determine how the articles will work together. This seems a little backwards in Joomla, but I make a placeholder article and use it for every menu entry. Once I have the menu in place, I determine how many categories I need. I create my categories and then start writing my articles and assigning them to the correct categories. I edit the menu entries as I finish each article to add the real articles instead of the placeholders.

In the case of the home page, I wanted that to work as a blog. Instead of assigning an article to the menu, I changed the menu item type to "category blog" and assigned it to a category I created called "homepage blog." I made three articles in the "homepage blog" category to test the blog.

Once I had the menu and articles the way I wanted them, I started editing the template. I choose to stick with the default template, but I altered the color scheme. I checked to see what CSS class each element was assigned to using the Firebug add-on to Mozilla Firefox. I simply right-clicked on the elements I wanted to change and viewed them with Firebug. Once I knew their classes, I edited the CSS for the template. I made a new header image with a combination of creative commons and Microsoft clip-art. I also downloaded a free font that looked appropriate to the subject matter. I uploaded the header image using the Media Manager and changed the header pathway in the template CSS file.

I didn't do a lot of stylistic changes, but I'm happy with how quickly I created the site. Compared with when I started learning Joomla over a year ago, this exercise made me realize how far I've come.

Finished my Joomla site: http://nwright.cloudaccess.net/. Now I just need to do the write-up.

Knowing when to post

There's apparently a sweet spot during the day for tweets and facebook posts: http://mashable.com/2012/05/09/best-time-to-post-on-facebook/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29 The commenter almost immediately picked up in the flaw of the article, which is if you are trying to reach a national or even global audience, how can this have any meaning? But for those of use trying to reach our local library patrons, it may have some merit.

Choosing a Wiki

Describe main characteristics (identify at least four characteristics [e.g., population served, library type, budget] ) of the library and goal of the wiki.

Athens-Clarke County Library is a public library serving a population of 116,714 people. The Athens Regional Library System has 11 branches (including surrounding counties: Franklin, Madison, Oconee, and Oglethorpe) and serves 222,203 people; the combined annual operating budget is $3,693,807.49. One of the branches, Pinewoods Library, is purposefully located in a Spanish speaking neighborhood to reach out to the growing Hispanic population in Athens.

Identify the library's requirements for a wiki.

The region already has a strong web presence with a webpage that covers policies, events, branch information, and research resources. The wiki would serve as a community and literacy building tool where patrons could work with librarians to post reviews of library materials, form book clubs, and provide supplementary information (such as the order of popular book series) that is not available in the catalog.

The region has its own Apache-Linux server, so hosting is not needed, and indeed, there is no budget for it. For this reason, the wiki also has to be open source. Because of the large population size of the region, a database-structured wiki is preferred to allow for faster searching. Some of the IT staff have experience with Perl, PHP, and Javascript, so those are the preferred programming languages for the back end, but a WYSIWYG in the front end is absolutely necessary to allow non-computer savvy patrons (and librarians) to participate.

Choose a wiki that meets the library's requirements.

Using WikiMatrix, the choices were narrowed down to 12. Several were discarded for being in beta since an established program is preferred. Others were not designed for non-technical users or just lacked special features that the final choice had. The final choice was MediaWiki.

MediaWiki was designed for users of all levels, and has the added advantage of multiple language packs so the Spanish speaking patrons can participate also. It has full text search, unlimited updates, and allows all revisions of a page to be compared, not just the most recent.

Organizing Google Reader

Following all of my classmates' blogs and the suggested module 1 blogs has tripled the number of blogs I follow in Google Reader.  I used to just let them all sit in one feed, because all of it was entertainment, but now I need to separate fun blogs from school blogs.  So I created folders (See Google Help) to organize the feeds.  So now I have my fun folder, my classmates folder, and professional information blogs all separated out.  It's much easier to keep track of updates now, and to avoid the temptation of reading the fun stuff when I should be working on homework.

More technical and less social

So far this class is proving to be a struggle.  I don't keep up a personal blog, and I hardly post on Facebook.  I don't feel like I have significant content to offer.  I thought from the description of this class that it would be more about the technical side of implementing solutions for libraries, and less about participating in them from the front end.  I suppose this is my weakness.  I like solving technical problems, but I usually work with people who handle the actual content.  I just make it happen.  So how does one develop a gift for gab?

Twitter and identity

I just signed up for my twitter account.  I discovered in the process that someone had already signed up using my email address. One password-reset later, and the account is mine.  I don't remember getting any sort of alert in my email that I had a twitter account.  Maybe there was and I overlooked it, but it is a nice reminder that digital identities and brands are easily stolen.  The person using my account only had one follower.  I wonder what she will think when she starts getting library-related tweets.

Welcome to my MLIS 7505 Blog

This blog is part of my MLIS 7505 - Applied Technologies in Library Practice class at Valdosta State University. I'll be writing about web 2.0 and corresponding library 2.0 practices.  So far my web 2.0 experience is with:

• Facebook
• Pinterest
• Blogger
• Joomla (Content Management System)

If MMORPGs count, then I have a few of those as well. ;-)
I will be chronicling my new experiences here. I'm about to start a Twitter account, although I had passed on it before as not worth my limited time. I know Twitter has been used to organize revolutions, but when I think of it, all I can picture is vapid celebrities. Hopefully my opinion will be changed for the better by trying it myself. I just don't have the personality type to send my thoughts out into the world, so having both a public blog and twitter account is going to stretch my comfort zone.