L&LR staff blog

(*Sorry.) (**Really, really, so sorry.) In the summer of 2009, I started tweeting new items that were being added to our Repository. Here’s how I did it: I took the address of the RSS feed from our EPrints Repository. I created an account on Twitterfeed (www.twitterfeed.com) and fed the RSS feed into it. I created a [...]

I spotted this on Twitter and thought it was worth sharing. Google were worried that 10% of people (using small browser windows) were missing content on the right-hand edge of one of their web pages, so they did some analysis of several weeks of visitors’ browser sizes, and created this: http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/ It’s a huge generalisation, [...]

As threatened, I was at BCU in Birmingham a week ago (30th Nov) for #middlemash. The morning after the official mashed library Pre-conference Networking Activity (PNA), a good few of us met on the train up to Perry Barr railway station near the campus. I’m not going to do a chronological write-up of the day [...]

I’m at Birmingham City University on Monday for mashed library event No.3, a.k.a. #Middlemash. I’m giving a lightning talk in the morning covering the work we’ve done on using RefWorks to create new-book RSS feeds; I’ll also be trying to raise interest around Joss’s and my project to develop WordPress MU as a platform for [...]

(With apologies to Christian Bök for the title.) I’m going to the long-anticipated Mashed Library 2009 (“Mash Oop North“) tomorrow at the University of Huddersfield. If you want to follow the action from afar, here’s what one of the organisers (guess who?!) has suggested in a post on the event blog: If you’re wanting to [...]

Because wordclouds are everywhere…? This week – a wordcloud created from the biographies of the 164 people who are currently following me on the social-networking website Twitter. They would appear to be mainly librarians working in universities (as opposed to mad axe-murderers, which is good…). This cloud was created using a site called Twittersheep (www.twittersheep.com), [...]

In the spirit of the BBC’s Poetry Season to ‘let poetry into your life’  I’m re-tweeting a link to a poem commissioned by Essex County Council  to mark the inauguration of their new ELAN library computer system, posted by a librarian on Twitter.  The link will open the poem in Word. http://bit.ly/hW6Ok

I’ve been in London for a couple of days, obsessively seeking out free wifi so that I can test out the new L&LR netbook PC, which is one of these. Observations on the device: 9″ screen fine; mini-keyboard fine and actually easier to use in a confined space (e.g. the 17:03 from King’s Cross to [...]

Joss introduced me to Yammer today… it’s a ‘microblogging’ service, similar to Twitter or the Facebook ‘status update’, but designed for work – it looks like an interesting way for groups of dispersed colleagues to keep in touch with what the others are up to in a non-threatening way! There’s a small (6 users!) but [...]