Random Reading: Bookmarks and Books

While reading a great article in the Charleston City Paper (I really have to give props to their Web 2.0 skillz) I found a new bookmarking site, Mister Wong.  It appears to be a multi lingual version of Del.icio.us, which I find really interesting.  I like messing around with languages, words, idioms, etc, and I don't mind subtitles.

During the process of importing some Del.icio.us bookmarks into Mr. Wong, I found a new Library 2.0 site, Open Library, which wants to create a web page for every book, according to their site info.  Looks like an interesting site to keep an eye on and play around with.

I must say that Del.icio.us' new look is much more graphically appealing.  The import/export process was also really easy.  This was the first time, I tried that, too.   I went ahead and imported all my random Del.icio.us bookmarks into one account, as well.  Now to trim the tags.

A Little Tab'll Do Ya!

I am really lovin' the tabs so now I am converting the library blogs that I work on to tabbed versions using the CSS stylesheets from http://www.btemplates.com/ . I can see possiblities for major improvements in navigation and access to info using these templates. Click the links below to see what tabs can do. Please note that these are still under construction.

http://standrewslibrary.blogspot.com/

http://standrewslibrarychildren.blogspot.com/

Picture from T.J. Wagner's Tab Gallery. Available at http://home.epix.net/~tjwagner/myfulltabbottle.jpg. Accessed 7/14/08.

Clonification and My Year of Blogging Dangerously: Faux Wordpress Templates

Exploring the options of Wordpress has pushed me to expand my knowledge of Blogger. I have decided to stick with Blogger as my primary blogging platform for this blog. My horizon has definitely been expanded by interacting with Wordpress. I really liked using Chris Pearson's Cutline Template (Wordpress.org) on my own site but find the Wordpress.com version too constraining to use as my only blogging option primarily, as I mentioned before, because of the banning of Javascript.
I googled to see what other people were saying about the topic of Wordpress versus Blogger and found a great blog, Smithereens, with a pretty clear discussion of the limitations of Wordpress.com. I also found out that just like MySpace, Blogger has inspired folks to create CSS layouts/templates so that users can customize their blogs.
I have always used the templates that come with Blogger and have never tried actually loading my own. Apparently interest in Wordpress clone templates for Blogger is a hot and happening thing. I have tried three templates so far and I found....tah dah!!... a Cutline clone template. The tabs are web addresses not pages like the Wordpress versions and the instructions in the code are written in Spanish, but that is okay. I am plowing ahead.
I paid for a year of web hosting for my birthday last year and created a blog using Wordpress (the dot org CMS - content management system - just learned that term yesterday ; ) ) This really pushed me to learn more about the mechanics of independant blogging, which was a good thing, I think. It was very technical; not infrequently over my head. Everytime I see "MySQL", I think "my squall" and "perfect storm".
In the end, I have learned that the biggest thing about using a free blog host versus DIY blogging is that free hosting saves a lot of time and brain power. Like Lyle Lovett said in the song, "one wrong move will turn your world upside down" when you are hosting your own blog. Fixing mess-ups was frustrating and took time away from the actual process of writing something. Using these custom Blogger templates is allowing me to get under the hood and tinker around without having to do too much. It is kind of like putting on some rims versus rebuilding the engine.

Negatory, Good Buddy: Things Wordpress Won't Do and Some That It Does Better

Exploring Wordpress.com and comparing it to the wonders of Blogger has been added to my way lengthy list of current geekoid interests. I have been using Blogger for about 3 years and the full version of Wordpress on a paid host for 9 months. I just started messing with Wordpress.com and am learning the limitations of the free version as well as how it differs from Blogger.

I really like the fact that Blogger is pretty user-friendly and free-and-easy with the Javascript widgets. Wordpress.com is also user-friendly and has some awesome features like built-in stats but sadly it is not welcoming of widgets from other sources and Javascript widgets are strictly verboten (click here for more on that and again here for a bit more). This means that some of my all-time favorite, most visually interesting, widgets don't work on Wordpress.com's blogging platform with free hosting.

In the immortal words of Jeri Blank, "Sad."

A Few of My Favorite
Widgets Which Won't Work in Wordpress.com
(Sorry, I could not resist the urge to alliterate. It's an English Major thing.)

*Library Thing Book Covers
*Twitter Badge
*Del.icio.us Tag Clouds
*Photobucket Slide
*Project Playlist Player

Methinks Wordpress may be too serious for some of my intended audience (families with young children and teens who are more likely to respond to an eye-catching visual like a slide of movie posters than a lot of words describing the actual movie).

Wordpress.org, the platform, will let you do anything you want because you are paying to host it yourself. If you crash, get hacked, whatever, it's on you. The dotcom free hosting site is another deal entirely; a very safe, secure place to engage in serious blogging.

I do love the tabs, on Wordpress.com, though. I can see some real use for that - more static info, like library location and hours, program and event schedules, on the tabbed pages and reviews on the front page (where the blog is) sorted by categories and tags.

The categories and tags feature of Wordpress appear to offer an especially efficient way to organize and sort posts. I plan to continue to work with Wordpress to increase my proficiency with these and other features. The Trek continues.....

Happy Trails!

Wordpress

My blogs are in motion. I have combined all of my "professional" blogging for the last two years into one big ball of bloggishness. I am playing with Wordpress and checking it out. It has a nice import feature that I used to add the stuff from this blog

Posting My Secret

I am addicted to PostSecret. My daughter turned me on to it a few years ago and I have it on my My Yahoo page (my home page) and I check it each week for the new secrets. I have "read" all the books, too. It is one of the most moving art works/projects I have ever experienced.

PostSecret now has a some extra content; audio secrets, YouTube videos, a Facebook group,etc.

Deliciously Clean Reads: A Great Book Review Blog!

Deliciously Clean Reads is a blog that reviews books that are free of sex and profanity for all ages including old favorites and new publications. If you are looking for some "family friendly reading", you might want to check this blog out!

http://cleanreads.blogspot.com/

My Book House: The Backstory

This blog is named for the My Book House set of chidren's books. These books were first published in the 1920's and were edited by Olive Beaupre Miller. I have added a link to Ms. Miller's biographical information from Smith College, her alma mater, which holds her papers in its Sophia Smith collection.

There was a 1937 twelve-volume set of My Book House at my grandmother's house that belonged to my father and his brother. As a preschooler, whenever I visited my grandmother, she would take a volume from the old glass front bookcase in her room and read it to me. When I was in first grade, I was finally big enough to "picture walk" and read through the books on my own.

The first volume, In The Nursery, which is for infants and toddlers, has full color illustrations and is filled with a wonderful selection of Mother Goose rhymes along with nursery rhymes from all around the world and a wonderful selection of poems for children. The second volume, Story Time, has some color illustrations, and has poems and classic folktale, stories, fables from around the world.

The succeeding volumes are lavishly illustrated with beautiful three-tone blue, sepia, and orange illustrations of magical gardens and heroes and fairies and are filled with stories and poems. The reading level becomes progressively more difficult in each volume as the set was designed to provide a basic library of reading material for a child from birth to adulthood. Later volumes have stories by classic authors such as Dickens and Shakespeare.

One of my favorite stories in My Book House is the poem, "Verses on Kingsley's Water Babies", which appears in Volume 3, Up On Pair of Stairs. The author is uncredited and may have been Ms. Miller, herself, as she is frequently named as the composer of many of the poems in the books. The illustrations were a major attraction. Mariel Wilhoite's pictures of the dirty chimney sweep's transformation into a naked, gilled water baby, who rides buoys, swims underwater, and talks to the huge king of the salmon totally fascinated me as a young child probably in part because my grandmother lived at the beach.

I think, perhaps, it is a testament to the power of good children's literature and illustrations, that I still enjoy reading this poem and best of all looking at the illustrations more than forty years later. I have most of that original My Book House set. I filled in the gaps with copies purchased on E-Bay. I still enjoy looking at these books and sharing the stories and poems with my own children.

Olive Beaupre Miller was ahead of her time. She selected what she believed was the best literature for children from sources from all around the world. Her selections are still remarkably current and mostly free of culturally insensitive material. Many of the children's illustrators, whose work appears in My Book House, are among the world's most famous, including Randolph Caldecott, William Blake, and N.C. Wyeth. She was even a proponent of sex education for children in the 1930's.

So here's to the memory of Olive Beaupre Miller! When I began to look for the missing volumes of My Book House on E-bay in 1999, I researched online and could find very little information about the books and nothing about Ms. Miller. When I started this blog, I found several sites with information including the Smith College site. I am glad to know that I can now google Ms. Miller and get a hit. I can't find an entry for her on Wikipedia yet, but I'll keep checking.

Welcome to My Book House

"Mother Goose had a house it was built in a wood,
where an owl by the door for a sentinal stood."

As a young child I enjoyed having my parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other family members read to me. My great-grandmother often sang to me and was especially fond of sharing nursery rhymes and poems. These rich and loving literacy experiences are some of my strongest and most powerful childhood memories. These experiences also provided a firm foundation for my literacy growth as a young adult and as an adult.

As a librarian, supporting literacy for the children, families, and adults that I serve is one of my highest goals. This blog is focused on literacy, particularly for children and families. I want to create a list of links to useful literacy sites, to post reviews of these sites as well as reviews of children's and YA books that I read and movies that I watch, and to explore topics that are related to reading, literature, research, education, and librarianship.