LibraryTechtonics

My apologies if this post reads poorly, my brain is stuck in producitivity mode, with communication leaping out in fits and spurts…

After my test run with WordPress, I decided that if I was going to have the PLA Blog ready for ALA later this month (or for my OPAL presentation on conference blogging this coming Friday), it was time to dive in and get a move on.

I started Sunday (I was on the desk all day Saturday), and I was able to get a significant amount of work done after the truly 5-minute install, and the super easy import from Blogger (way easier than the outdated documentation on the WordPress site). Most of what’s taking so long is porting over the static content, and configuring the blog to do everything it should upon release to the world (WP plugins *rawk*, and I would even venture to say they’re a bit addictive).

Blogger is really, really bare bones. Yes, you can do some interesting things with Blogger tags and what have you, but it’s nothing like what you can do with apps like Movable Type or WordPress. Due to the limitations of the current PLA Blog, there’s a lot to be done with getting the content situated in WordPress. My biggest issue right now is categories and tagging, since Blogger doesn’t really support it (you can add tags, but they’re kinda hacked into the HTML). Unfortunately, with the latest release of WP, the nifty batch-categories plugin no longer works, so all tagging needs to be done by hand.

The PLA Blog currently has about 564 posts. That’s a lot of hand-tagging. For now, I’m focusing on the conference posts, since by tagging the conference posts, I can generate a link to all of the posts for a given conference. Since we’ve lived this long without categories, we can live a little longer, I’m sure, and I may have some volunteers lined up to help with the rest of the hand tagging. Unless someone can work some magic and make the batch-categories plugin work with WP 2.0.3. I’d poke at the code if I had time, but I don’t. Perhaps I can bribe my husband to take a look at it, in-house programmers are handy that way…
Somehow, in performing The Move for the PLA Blog, I was able to overcome the issues I was having with The Move for my blog, even though I hadn’t fully figured out the issues on my dry run. Freaky. Sometimes a fresh perspective really improves the learning curve. At least that means I’ll be able to go back to The Move for my blog in July, and it’ll be even easier.

Overall, the new install is almost ready for public consumption. I did put out a call on the libs&libs Flickr group for Creative Commons licensed photos to create a banner for the blog that reloads to a new photo each time (many thanks to Jessamyn for the excellent idea).

The companion project to The Move will be the Updating of Documentation. Since the PLA conference bloggers for ALA this year will be working in a new blogging software, I need to change a few things in the documentation to make it accurate. Won’t be a huge problem, but still it needs to be done.

BTW, if you’re going to ALA, and you’d like to blog for PLA, send me an email and let me know.

Tags: technology