librarygrrrl.net: a screenshot history

I’m thinking about changing the look and feel of this blog again, thanks to some work that my friend Chanda has done on her site. Frankly, I’m thinking of using the same theme because I really like it. She’s got good taste.

And of course that got me thinking about the various iterations this blog/website has gone through. I haven’t taken screenshots of this site over the years, and realized that I couldn’t remember what all it looked like. Thank goodness I still have almost all of my old WordPress theme files still loaded in my blog folders, and thank goodness for the Internet Archive. The old theme files helped me get screenshots of the look-and-feel from 2005-present. The Internet Archive helped me get screenshots from 2003-2005. I’m missing one iteration in there, which is the first 9 months of my WordPress installation. Oh well.

From 2002, when I first registered the domain librarygrrrl.net:

I obviously kept some similar elements for the first couple of years. Here is early to mid 2003 (look! more links!)

And again… (and now we are in a column rather than a line. crazy!)

Hey there – I added poem to my home page in late 2003, and combined columns with lines for content links.

This was when I started using Thingamablog to blog. Despite the change in focus, there are a lot of similarities to the previous iterations (get with it and change the color and your icon, would you already?)

In between the previous screenshot and the following screenshot I blogged for 9 months using WordPress. I can’t for the life of me track down a screenshot, but apparently it was a modified version of the Kubrick theme that’s bundled with the WordPress installation. I’m still using WordPress, but have changed themes a few times since then. This one was based on a theme called MX4 (unavailable now):

Here is the theme Less-is-Purple, which I modified and used for 2 years. I suppose it’s nice enough – clean and somewhat simple – but sheesh. It’s boring.

And this is my current look and feel, based on the Greenery theme. the color is a bit shocking, isn’t it? Now that it’s November, I’m a little startled by such a brilliant green, a green that shrieks “springspringspring!!!!” So I might change things up. We’ll see.

The new look and feel? Well, you’ll have to stick around and see what happens. I really ought to not swipe Chanda’s theme but oooh I like it a lot and will be hard-pressed to convince myself otherwise. Before I do that, though, I’ll head over to the WordPress themes directory to see what I can come up with.

Educause 2008 – Final Schedule

A surprisingly large number of sessions still don’t have online materials. When they come online I’ll come back here and link to them. Overall, it was a very good conference, but I don’t think I managed my session selection very well. Next year I’d like to go to more sessions on teaching. As I look at this schedule, I seem to have missed all of those this time around.

Wednesday

• The Unique Human Brain: Clues from Neurology
• Exhibits (talked to Zimbra & Google)
• Lessons Learned from Deploying Sakai: An Interinstitutional Panel Discussion
• Leadership and Management Lightning Round for:
  • Library/IT Partnership: The View from the Dean’s Office
  • What Does a Web Enterprise Services Strategy Entail?
• Student E-Mail: New Options, New Solutions (the session of the singing loon)
• Poster Sessions for:
  • Library/IT Partnerships: A View from the Dean’s Office
  • A Combined Math and Rhetoric Lab Course: A Pilot Program
  • What’s Not in Your Wiki?
• Informal Learning Space presentation by MIT on their mobile device/iPhone application
• NITLE reception

Thursday

• Discussion Session: Outsourcing E-Mail
• The Facts of Life in a High-Tech Age (Moira Gunn)
• Discussion Session: Outsourcing Non-E-Mail Applications
• Lunch/Networking with Tweeps (Missed ELI Top Teaching & Learning Challenges of 2009 – bummer!)
• Exhibits (talked with Microsoft and Desire2Learn, got roped into talking with Bradford, got bag thrust at me by … some vendor I don’t even know. I took it.)
• Point/Counterpoint: Student Email: In or Out?
• Poster Sessions for:
  • Visit, Upload, and Share! Collaboration Through Web 2.0 Tools in an International Experience Class
  • Beyond Talking Heads: Creating a Web Video Channel
  • Altiris and Hardware Independent Imaging
  • Looking for IT Answers? Browse Our Service Catalogue

Friday

• Meant to go to Disconnects Between Learning Management Systems and Millennial Generation User Expectations but I ran into a former colleague and we networked for a while…
• UC Mobile (University of Cincinnati’s mobile phone offering)
• Should have gone to the closing session on Why IT Matters: A President’s Perspective on Technology and Leadership but I wanted to get to the airport with plenty of time for security, which ended up taking 5 minutes max. Twitter livefeed of the session indicates it was fantastic and dynamic. Grrrrrr….

A bunch of other sessions looked really good too, but I missed them for one reason or another.

• In and Outsourcing: Benefits and Risks
• Social Media and Education: The Conflict Between Technology and Institutional Education, and the Future
• The World War II Poster Project: Building Information Literacy Through Collaboration
• Mashups, Remixes, and Video Culture: Engaging the YouTube Generation in the Classroom
• The Launch of Google Apps for Education at USC: Determinants, Decisions, and Deterrents
• A Campus-Wide Approach for Mobile Learning with iPhones
• Tomorrow’s Students, Today’s K–12 Digital Learners: Are You Ready for Them?
• Faculty Use of Digital Resources and the Implications for Digital Libraries

Educause 2008 – Day 1

So I’m at my third (or is it fourth… I forget) Educause conference. Last year we were in lovely, gorgeous Seattle. As you might imagine, the city itself competed with the conference for my attention. This year we’re in Orlando, so not so much on that problem. The only upside about being in Orlando is the possiblity of seeing friends who live here tomorrow night. Not even the weather is much better than Boston.

(ETA this whole paragraph which I cannot believe I forgot. Long day much?)

The opening session speaker today was V.S. Ramachandran (official bio), a neurologist who talked about phantom limb pain and synesthesia. He’s a brilliant man and amazingly funny. He gave a TED talk last year, which was somewhat similar to today’s lecture.

After that great start-off, I struggled with session selection. The first couple I went to were on learning management systems, and we are so not at a place where anything the speakers were saying made sense to me. So instead I went and talked extensively with a few vendors about some of their products. Color me impressed with the second person I talked to at the Zimbra booth – he knew his stuff. The Google fellow was okay, but not as edgy or as hungry as the Zimbra people. That’s the problem with being the big guy – you don’t always know when someone is coming up from behind you, trying to knock you off your pedastel. Not that I think Zimbra will knock Google off of the bulk of their pedastels, but they do have some really compelling things about their product that I think many schools will find very attractive (*cough*integration with voice messaging*cough*). Spent some time talking with the Sharepoint LMS fellows too. It might just be me, but Sharepoint just doesn’t make sense to me yet. Perhaps it’s not having seen it used in any sort of situation… seems that it might be the issue.

The one session I went to today that really resonated with me was a session on student email and different ways of approaching it. There were large, medium, and small schools there (yay small schools!) and they took several approaches, from keeping it in-house to pushing it to the cloud via Google/Microsoft to using an open-source front-end to using a hosted open-source solution for everyone. The best moment of that session, though, had to be when the woman sitting next to me was working on her computer, which started in with a (very loud) loon wail that morphed into a yodel. (Note: those links are both to .au files, so don’t be that person who plays them in a conference session now, y’all.) Now I’m all about loon calls, having grown up on a lake in northern Minnesota with maybe a dozen mating pairs of loons. But in the middle of a session at Educause on student email solutions? It was hilarious, and the speaker handled it really well. Poor woman was embarrassed, as she should have been, but it definitely lightened the mood in the room.

I ran into several folks today who I wasn’t sure were coming: Mark C. and Janet S. from Bryn Mawr, Anne M. and Veronica B. from Wellesley (well, I knew they were coming, but still), and then I even met someone who worked at the University of Northern Iowa! We didn’t know each other when I was there, but he seemed like a nice guy and like he enjoys working there, so props to him. Still waiting to run into Pattie; reports are that she’s around.

The final thing I did today was go to the NITLE reception. I knew one person walking in there, and ended up meeting several other. That, of course, was the point. I enjoyed talking with John from Drake, Bryan Alexander, and Pamela from Occidental. Made a bit of a fool of myself with someone else, doing the whole, “I know you but I don’t know quite why I know you” spiel. Later it occured to me that he’s a former president of a national library association and his face was all over stuff several years ago. D’oh!

Tomorrow morning starts early, so I’m headed to bed now. Go Phillies, World Series 2008 Champions!

iPod Touch Applications

About a month ago, I got a new iPod Touch for free when I purchased a new laptop. Yay for working in academia and buying right before the fall semester!

Not Martha just posted her list of favorite apps for her iPhone (alas, I didn’t go that route since I’m extremely happy with my current cell phone provider and plan). Like her, I’ve downloaded a lot of applications too, and have found myself using some of them more than others. Unlike her, I don’t always have a connection to the internet through the 3G network, so I like apps which have online and offline features. I also like FREE apps, but would be willing to consider paying for really exceptional apps.

Here’s my partial list of favorite apps:

Air Sharing: connect your iPod to your laptop or desktop wirelessly and upload/download files; this is very helpful for when I’m taking files from computer to computer but only want to sync with one of them. I got this when it was free for a limited time; it’s the one app on here I would have elected to pay for if I’d had to.

Exposure: my new favorite app for accessing my Flickr account; doesn’t have offline access (that I can tell of) but it lets me see 100 of the most recent thumbnails of my photo stream as well as the same of all my contacts’ photo streams. Easily load more from your own photo stream.

Instapaper: Browsing at your computer and want to read something later? Install this app on your device and install the bookmarklet on your browser, then click the bookmarklet to save the file for reading later. Sync your Touch and the files get uploaded. Not the slickest for implementation, but nice for filing away stuff you want to get to “some day” and for when you’re offline.

NYTimes: not quick, and a little buggy, but so nice to be able to get access to big chunks of the NYT for free each day. You end up downloading the entirety of a couple of sections when you’re connected, and can read it when you’re offline. For access to other sections, you need to be online and/or patient.

Stanza: pretty decent e-book reader. I’ve downloaded a bunch of out-of-copyright and Creative-Commons licensed titles and am having fun getting through them. All 25K+ Project Gutenberg titles are available for downloading and reading. Offline-friendly. Easy to change text/font size, and simply as pie to turn the page. (Simply tap the right side of the page to go to the next page, tap the left side to go to the previous page.)

Twitterific: Online-only, obviously. Nice interface to that most ubiquitous of microblogging tools, Twitter. (My updates over there are protected, so don’t expect to wander over and just find me…)

I’ve also downloaded a bunch of free games – all offline – and have had a lot of fun playing these:

• Four Free – like Connect Four
• Mahjong Solitaire – I got this when it was free for a limited time
• Morocco – like Othello
• SolFree Solitaire – 5 different types of solitaire

Do you have any must-own apps for your iPod touch or iPhone? Tell me what they are!

Final (almost) Updates

Alrighty. I think I’m nearly ready to call this done. I’ve changed a lot of things today.

• Upgraded WP from 2.2 to 2.5
• Deleted multiple plugins which WP 2.5 made obsolete
• Found a new theme (Greenery)
• Added several new plugins (Admin Dropdown Menu, Flickr Manager, FlickrRSS, and WP-Highslide)

This is a photo inserted using Flickr Manager:

This is a photo inserted using WP-Highslide (click on it – it’s pretty cool!)

The photos on the right side of the page are managed using FlickrRSS.

The one thing I need to do is to update the header/banner image at the top of the page, but I can’t do that until I have access to a better image editor than I have at home. That’s okay, though. I can wait.

So. What do you think?