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The UK library world (at least online) today seems obsessed by the debate/session being held at CILIP today to discuss the organisation’s involvement with web 2.0, mostly centered on CILIP’s failure to engage with anything like Twitter, Facebook, open blogs (by which I mean ones non-members could comment on, which they couldn’t until this whole thing blew up), RSS feeds (this being my own personal beef for some time), and the like. It all became a big issue following this post by CILIP CEO Bob McGee, followed by this post from Phil Bradley. I personally think it’s shocking, even if we take into account Bob McGee’s claim to be merely consulting on the issue, that CILIP have been so slow to develop any kind of presence in these kinds of sites and technologies. The reaction to hold a meeting was in some respects a good one, in some respects bad, as it shows how formal and slow CILIP still feels the need to be. They could have set up some official presences in various places like Facebook, their news feed could have been diverted to Twitter to reach a larger audience, and a vacancies RSS feed surely wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility, all cheap, quick, and easy to set up.
There are two issues here really: 1) that the professional body for information professionals is not involved in up-to-date methods of information dissemination, which is bad for its reputation and credibility; 2) that it is not using these technologies for its own purposes, e.g. marketing research into its own reputation and credibility, although, to be fair, Bob McGee started the whole thing by pointing out that people had been asking on Twitter about any official CILIP presence on micro-blogging websites.
Follow #CILIP2 on Twitter if want to see what is going on and you have nothing else to do this afternoon. I get the impression everyone who is going is also Twittering the event, so I wonder who will be actually partaking in the debate. The feed at the moment feels like a forum during the Eurovision Song Contest. There does seem a fair bit of optimism around the session, although I don’t think a formal session such as this can effect the cultural change at CILIP HQ to really make a difference, especially as these things keep changing and can’t rely on one meeting and one set of resolutions.
I fear that someone with a sense of humour may have been writing for the Bedfordshire on Sunday this week. Under the unlikely headline Bishop of Bedford bashing world poverty the article explains:
Bishop Richard took up one end of a rope with members of the Bedford Athletic rugby team on the other. He was the lone ‘tugger’ against the combined forces of the rugby players.
I suppose we just should be grateful the rugby team weren’t bashing the bishop while he tugged alone on his end of the rope. You’ll have to read the article for the whole story, which is entirely innocent and in fact all in a very good cause.
In the first of a series clearing up the great mysteries of our time, for my own benefit if nothing else, I here present the difference between raisins, currants, and sultanas. I think it is simplest to say that they are all raisins, a generic name for a dried grape; currants and sultanas are really specific types of raisin, although currant sometimes has a wider application. The etymology is given in square brackets:
- Raisin: Dried grape.
[O. Fr. for grape (also, of course, modern Fr. for grape)]
- Currant: Dried grape of the Black Corinth variety, being a small variety of seedless grape from Greece.
[Anglo-Fr. "raisins de Corauntz" or "Raisins of Corinth]
- Sultana: Dried grape of the Sultana variety, being a white, seedless variety of grape from Turkey, Greece, or Iran, also known as Thompson Seedless grapes. Many raisins, including most California raisins, are in fact specifically sultanas.
[Presumably from the word "sultana" as in the wife of a sultan or a female sultan, presumably from the geographical origin of the sultana grape in the regions of the former Ottoman Empire].
Almost all of the above information is derived from various Wikipedia articles, so must be true. I can’t see why anyone would put up false information about the origin of currants, so I would hope none of this is actually LIES. The etymology of sultana is my own presumption, as I hope I made clear.
Next: the difference between butterflies and moths.
I now live in a purely ceremonial county now that Bedfordshire County Council no longer exists. I can’t say I’m particularly sad to see it go as the good services seemed to come from Mid Bedfordshire District Council and the less impressive services from the County Council, although this is something of a gross generalization. I also think the extra layer of local government was helping no-one. Waste, for instance, was collected by Mid Beds but disposed of by the County. I don’t really care as long as it is collected (and recycled and everything of course) by someone. I would be happy if it were central government if it worked. Considering the strong control that central government puts on local government anyway (not necessarily a bad thing in many ways), maybe this is an idea.
Anyway, Sandy is now in Central Bedfordshire (official site), which is basically the more rural bits of Bedfordshire without the buzzing metropoles of Bedford and Luton. It does include Dunstable and Leighton Buzzard, however, which by Mid Beds standards, do count as sizable towns.
Following yesterdays lament at the loss of my lovely Roman dates, sil has kindly converted my old Blosxom plugin (get the plugin itself from the Unofficial Blosxom User Group version 2 plugin list: it’s called date_roman-v0i1) to Wordpress, so I now have them back. Hooray! Now no-one will know what the date of any of my posts are again!
BTW, if you want to beware the Ides of March, they are on Sunday…
The conversion of this weblog to new software is, as the Emperor would say, complete. It all went rather well in the end, including the transfer of comments, which is a bonus. As a reader I really doubt if you care about any of this, but these notes may be useful to anyone wanting to do the same thing, as well to me, so nerr.
To convert from Blosxom to locally installed Wordpress, I tried DeWitt Clinton’s blosxom_to_wp_import programme, but this fell down as the Wordpress wiki wasn’t joking when it said it was “picky about html correctness”. I then tried one from Insanum, which worked very well aside from not recognising “../” when it looked for a file in the same directory. I got rid of that bit and it worked fine. You have to do a little bit of fiddling round to set up the template or theme, then it’s merely a matter of battling with Firefox not liking to show updated XML files for some reason. The instructions were generally very good.
Posts came across perfectly except for minor character coding issues, which I think were my fault. They were dated OK (although I’ve lost my lovely Roman dates). Comments also came across although I didn’t expect them to. They have however lost their original dates, which I can live with. I have already managed to delete the 1675 spam messages using the Comments bit on Wordpress. This is a lot easier.
What hasn’t come across are the Permalinks, as on blosxom I used multilevel category paths and these were lost in the conversion. This is not exactly the most popular blog in the world so there this isn’t the end of said world. Using mod_rewrite magik (with some hints from Halvorsen), I have however managed to make sure the ten most looked-at posts from the last year or so will redirect. I have also managed to make sure that the old index.rss and index.xml feeds still work as well as the new /feed/ feed that Wordpress uses. No-one read my index.atom feed, so screw that: it’s gone. Tags have also gone, but I can rebuild those, at least for the posts which deserve them.
I should also thank sil, who kindly suggested I install Wordpress using Subversion, which made it a breeze and who happily answered my various idiotic questions along the way, as always.
Do feel free to help me test how comments work by writing crap in the comments to this post.
I am going to attempt to change the software running this weblog very soon, hopefully this week, so I apologise for any annoying phenomena such as duplicated posts appearing in RSS readers, unavailable pages, less beautiful design, and so forth.
I would be unwise to suggest that all links and content will be unaffected after the conversion although I will try to ensure that as much works as possible as before. Comments are a likely casualty, which is not a great problem with the amount of comments I get, especially after I honed the bespoke spam detector so well that no comments at all are allowed.
However, rest assured that the same erratic frequency and dodgy quality of posting will be continued, so your patience will ultimately be rewarded.
Oh, and in case anyone’s interested, which I doubt, I am attempting to move from Blosxom to Wordpress.
Bob McGee (chief executive of CILIP) asks if CILIP should get involved with Twitter. Phil Bradley answers in no uncertain terms.
My own comment on the matter can be found on Phil Bradley’s post (together with a further plug for my CILIP vacancies rss feed). However, I think it is not without significance to this debate and CILIP’s attitude to technology, its own reform, and outreach, that I cannot comment on Bob McGee’s post itself as I am not a CILIP member. FTW.
On the way to work this morning, I noticed this unusual message on a London bus, which was a little unexpected to say the least:
Thank goodness I had my camera with me.
N.B. This has nothing to do with this excellent site (via Where Worlds Collide). Really.
Stuart (who’s birthday it is today) kindly tagged me to find out 7 things you may (or may not) know about me. Without further ado and cursing who’s fault it is or whose to blame for these things:
- I was in a “band”, the same “band” that Stuart “managed” when we were at university together. We were called Silver* and won a battle of the bands competition and were most excellent. I still have a gig poster around somewhere.
- I passed GCSE maths when I was 13 with a grade D. I passed it again at the more normal time and didn’t get a D.
- I can fold my ears.
- I can’t drive.
- I have never flown in an aeroplane.**
- I was born in a cross-fire hurricane in a military hospital. It still exists, but you can’t get near it for the barbed wire and checkpoints and stuff.
- I was once stopped and questioned, along with my brother, for shoplifting. We had been sent by mum and dad to buy some rubber grommets from a DIY shop, and had been furnished with the metal electrics box said grommets fit into in order to ensure correct size and so forth. After leaving the shop disappointed, we were called back in by a plain clothed, and not particularly burly, security guard who brought us in to be questioned by the manager. I think it was our cast-iron confidence that mum would still have the receipt for the metal box that persuaded them to let us go. That, and the obvious fear. I don’t think mum did have the receipts in the end.*** I was also once stopped by the police late at night on the way from a house of a friend who lived in a different village outside Durham, where I went to university. It rather spoiled an otherwise lovely and peaceful walk. I don’t think they had any particular reason for stopping me except that it was unusual to be walking around that night of night/early morning. I suppose I deserved it…
I’m not sure I can pass this joy on to 7 different people. However, here are some: Simon (who passed GCSE maths aged 13 and got a C), Tim, on the grounds that 50% of his blog posts in the last two years have been in response to memes passed on from me, and I’ve only passed him one before, Bill, who I don’t think even knows I read his weblog even though he’s sitting about 10 yards in front of me, Lynne, who I would think shouldn’t surprise me too much, and Andy (who I know was tagged by Stuart, but he needs a little nudge in these things).
* I sometimes regret not agreeing to the bassist’s suggestion: Penetration.
** I’ve actually been on Concorde, but it wasn’t going anywhere at the time.
*** Although she did successfully return a saucepan to the Co-op some ten years after purchase, based on a lifetime guarantee and still having the receipt.
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