Wednesday, May 29, 2002

Multi-author Web logs As mentioned in the the following article there's a tool to facilitate aggregating multiple authors into a single weblog. We've been looking at this to handle a web project that uses multiple researchers to feed a central repository for post-processing. How it works   Everyone in the group writes with their own copy of Radio and publishes their weblog in both HTML and RSS. One of the editors takes responsibility for running the Multi-Author Weblog Tool, which joins all the individual feeds into a single weblog. This person is the webmaster of the multi-authored weblog. Each hour when the news aggregator scans for new posts, any new items appearing in your author's feeds are automatically posted to the webmaster's weblog. 7:44:43 AM     Segue into "What My Summer Looks Like from Here". Calif. not alone in Oracle criticism "Some of the more controversial aspects of the database giant's contract fiasco are all too familiar to tech officials in other government agencies." [CNET News.com] We don't have the same type of "contract fiasco" as California, but my government/education agency (SLS) is dumping Oracle Portal none the less. Here's what my summer is shaping up like as we move away from the horribly complex Portal software. I had to make a recommendation for new software to move us forward faster ("we can rebuild it - we have the technology!"), so I narrowed down the choices to two - Macromedia's ColdFusion + UltraDev and Userland's Frontier/Manila + Radio. My list of wants and needs included: Providing an events calendar pretty much out of the box, plus event registration Multi-level authentication The ability to generate my own templates Generated HTML output that meets at least priority one of the WAI guidelines The ability to blog or simulate blogging Automatically generated RSS feeds for those blogs A robust search engine that can handle DOC, PDF, and PPT files A hundred other things The key is that I'm not really a programmer, so I need something I can get up to speed on pretty quickly, especially since we don't really have any more money for consulting. For the little bit of money we do have available for changing to new software, my list was pretty much impossible for any vendor to meet. I was asking for the moon, all of the stars (visible to the naked eye and not), and a few galaxies thrown in for good measure, and I knew it. When push came to shove and we finally had to make a decision, we went with Macromedia's tools, only because it would take more ramp up time for me to make the Userland products do things like event registration, search PDFs, etc. So now we're in the process of installing the MM software (although it's been frustrating trying to move forward with the new MX stuff since it's only a preview release at this point). I think the large developer community and the developer Exchange will be a big help in getting me started. Tomorrow I'm going to try working from the current products (not MX) on the server itself. I think this side of the equation will be fairly easy, if I can just get everything configured correctly, which has been a big obstacle the past week. But I still wanted the blogging and news aggregation that I think could be so useful to my organization. So the good news is that I'm getting the best of both worlds - well, we're getting the best of both worlds. Not only do I have high hopes for ColdFusion, but I've convinced my boss to implement Radio Userland for a number of individuals on staff, and I plan to integrate the blogs into the new web site I'll be building this summer using the MM software. If I'm right, I can have the Radio blogs FTP to directories in the ColdFusion site so that they'll be indexed by the Verity search engine. I can also add my own meta tags to those templates. The "categories" feature of Radio should make it incredibly easy for anyone to send posts to the correct sites (intranet, extranet, public site, etc.), and I can make the templates match the rest of the web site. If I learn enough UserTalk someday, I think I could add my own boxes for metadata so employees could further classify each post at it is entered. In addition, the new multi-author tool in Radio should help with collaborative blogging, and I can't wait to get an RCS server up and running internally! Eventually, I want to provide the first RCS server for libraries & librarians, too! So I'm really psyched about all of this, although I'm also rather daunted at the prospect of learning UltraDev, ColdFusion, Fireworks, hopefully X-HTML, more CSS, more about usability (especially testing), thesaurii, UserTalk, and more about Radio in order to implement everything according to my vision. I'm great at the vision part - it's getting reality to match up where I have problems! I'll provide periodic updates as we go along, especially as my first big deadline looms on June 6th! [The Shifted Librarian] 7:39:43 AM     Communities and Connectors in the Blogosphere. I wish I could be like Jon Udell (and others) who are programmers that can immediately implement their ideas. Today, Jon did some thinking about Social Networking in Radiospace, and then he proceeded to visualize it. Read more.... [The Shifted Librarian] 7:30:45 AM     Interface Builder Palettes. CocoaDevCentral: “Interface Builder palettes allow you to drag and drop an object into your project’s nib file, edit an object’s attributes through an Inspector, and put an object into ‘Test Mode.’ These properties make palettes a great way to distribute your own custom objects to other developers. So let’s get started and see just how easy it is to palettize an object.” [ranchero.com] 7:27:48 AM     At my request, Paolo published a Mac OS X script that keeps Radio running.  [Scripting News] 7:18:40 AM     An Egyptian Stumper Confounds Google "A 'simple' query that seems like a no-brainer for Google turns out to be an excellent illustration of why you can't find "everyting" on the Internet.... Now here's a key search tip. That page mentions the recipe but doesn't list it. We could keep searching, but let's instead try something different. Can we find this Karen Taylor and just ask her?... The key point here is to remember that search engines may be more useful to take you part of the way to an answer, where 'old fashion' attempts like asking people the right question who know can take over." [Search Day, via Library Stuff] Just as good a title for this article would have been "why librarians rule as searchers." The average person probably would have given up much faster than Danny did. It reminds me of the first really great article that inspired me as a reference librarian. It's written by Mary Goulding, who used to work at SLS before I was here, and it's called Real Librarians Don't Play Jeopardy. I wish the full text was available online, but it isn't. It's similar to what Marylaine Block preaches - go where the answer is. If you'd like a copy, contact your local library and request one.  ;-) Goulding, Mary. "Real librarians don't play Jeopardy." Illinois Libraries, v.73, no. 2, Feb. 1991, p. 140-46. [The Shifted Librarian] 7:16:56 AM

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