Ever heard of Yahoo pipes? This is a handy tool that allows you to combine RSS feeds from blogs, podcasts, and other sources into one handy feed. I’ve put together a single feed for all of the library’s blogs and podcasts. It is: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=JK5fBGvf3BG15aR9YEsBXw&_render=rss

Here is how it looks:

This is very cool. Our IT department has helped out the by putting up our own Feed Parser. Now, sure what a feed parser it? Basically, it’s a tool that lets you take display an RSS feed in a Web page (Blackboard page, blog, etc) as a bulleted list. It is an easy way for the less technically savvy faculty members to incorporate outside content into course sites. I’ve put together this Feed parser help page to explain how this works a bit more.

Here’s a sample of our parser in action using the feed from the library’s Check It Out Podcast:

We are trying out feedburner’s email updates for our blogs (news, research tools, and this blog). I know that a vast majority of students and faculty are not using screen readers (although that percentage shrinks everyday). Email is still central…but we’ll see how that develops down the road. None-the-less, the email updates for the blogs are an easy way to get content to users.

The migration to the WordPress-supported blogs are now complete. All of our blog content has been transfered over with nothing lost. This was a fairly manageable move, but I hit the typical sort of migration issues. I accidentally messed up some of the php for the sidebar, so I wasted time fixing that.

I was worried that I’d lose most of the images that we posted over the years. Luckily, I backed up all of the images. I was able to upload them to a local server. Then I took the blog data and did a find and replace for the old img source to the new image location, and all of the images are still with the correct posts.

I had to go through update all of the user info. Then, I emailed each user with the new addresses for the blogs and their login info.

It looks like there will be some advantages to this move.

1. The older version of MovableType that we were using was open to tons of blog spam. We hadn’t upgraded to newer versions for several reasons that I won’t delve into, but suffice it say, we will be happy to have comments. (Moderated comments.)
2. We were using “zempt” as our blog editing software. This was a nice, simple interface for our non-tech-savvy users, but it required me to run around downloading this on machines. Now, we are totally Web-based. WordPress appears to be a simple enough interface.
3. There appears to be more options for user types in this WordPress installation than what we had in the older version of MovableType.
4. We have used this as an opportunity to update and simplify the look and feel of our site. Old Banner New Banner
5. We also used this as an opportunity to route our RSS feeds through feedburner.
6. Plus, we added a list of chicklets on to ease subscriptions in various readers.

This move really has nothing to do with dissatisfaction with MovableType as it does with more administrative concerns. Our blogs were formerly hosted by our regional library system (thanks MLS!), and now we have brought this to a server in-house. This has been our longterm goal. WordPress was the system that our campus IT selected, so here we are.

The Library’s blogs are moving! Please update your links to our site and our feeds!

News Blog:
http://morainestudents.com/librarynews/

Resources and Search Tips:
http://morainestudents.com/searchtips/

Construction Blog:
http://morainestudents.com/libraryconstruction/

Frankenstein Blog:
http://morainestudents.com/frankenstein/

Today, I figured out how to import from Movabletype to Wordpress. It was actually much, much easier than I thought. This piece on the Wordpress site was all I needed. It is ironic to me that I am posting this using Movabletype, but our goal is to leave Movabletype. My posts within MT are limited.

We are starting the process of migrating our blogs out of mobable type and into Wordpress. This is largely due to administrative issues surrounding hosting our blogs. I am going out onto the Web to do some reading.

Our collection management librarian, Joe and I put together a new podcast that highlights resources in our library. As I did the behind the scenes work to get this podcast ready for the public, I forgot about all of the steps involved in getting this out. Thus, as a form of documentation and as a way to share with others who may be interested, here are the steps (which took about a day). There are probably experienced podcasters out there who may think I am doing this all backwards…but, que sera.

1) Proposed podcast objectives, purpose, and assessment to administration for approval
2) Recorded introductions and closings with our campus sound guy
3) Discussed and outlined podcast episodes
4) Recorded episodes
5) Spliced intros, raw episode files, and closings, dropped MP3 file size (16 kbs, 11025 Hz, mono)
6) Created XML file (which I am still doing by hand)
7) Tested XML file in iTunes, Netvibes, Bloglines Trouble shooted (trouble shot?) XML file in FeedBurner to find two problems (feedburner and iTunes did not like the = sign in our asp page URLs in the perm link tags, so I had to use the alternate URLs)
9) Created FeedBurner Feed
10) Created FeedBlitz service for email notifications
11) Created email sign up page and tested page
12) Created new Web page for podcast, moved template to that page, updated content
13) Submitted XML feed to iTunes
14) Updated Chicklets (iTunes, Bloglines, Google, MyYahoo) on right side of podcast page and tested them to be sure they worked
15) Gave the pages a final review
16) Submitted pages to our Created Services Department for a final proof
17) Published pages to the college’s public Web site

Our library has added several Google maps to our Web site. We recognized that we continually direct students to useful places (such as public libraries) around our college district. We thought that adding a map of these locations would be pretty nice. Thus, we put together the maps section of our site.

We have updated our catalog’s look and feel. We have also improved some of the functionality of our catalog.