Chicago Librarian

Some systems have a reputation for being simple, such as WordPress, but only as long as your needs are simple. The moment you need some high falutin' customization -- say, in this article, limiting access to blog posts to certain individuals -- things become way more complicated. I mean, you'd never have to go through this level of complexity in Drupal just to get to the same point. In fact, in Drupal, the capability is built in.

Limiting The Visibility Of Posts In WordPress Via Usernames

Controlling who is able to view a post is a simple task once the system is established. Limiting access to certain users has several applications, such as enabling a design studio to distribute artwork to its various clients, or enabling a small school to arrange for homework to be posted online using a cheap and easy solution.

Gearing up for a presentation on 'Responsive Web Design' that I'll be giving at the UIC Webmaster Brownbag next week. From the official announcement:

UIC Web Professionals,

Join us for a discussion about Responsive Web Design on Thursday, February 2, noon - 1 p.m. Leo Klein, Coordinator for Web Communications in the Office of Admissions and Records, will discuss Responsive Web Design as a significant development in how we approach web design -- what's got us to this point, the need to design for various platforms from PCs to tablets and smartphones. The session will include discussion of key topics including Media Queries and Mobile First.

Audience: all levels. Also, experience and thoughts from others on this subject is encouraged and highly appreciated.

Not much fun at the moment. Working on a big web design project (with a deadline).

Ethan Marcotte on the inadvisability of setting up a purely mobile site:

"...Fragmenting our content across different 'device-optimized' experiences is a losing proposition, or at least an unsustainable one. As the past few years have shown us, we simply can't compete with the pace of technology. Are we going to create a custom experience for every new browser or device that appears?"

Old pal from the Wonderful Guise, Stew and his band had a concert at the Space in Evanston. I got there a little late because I had reference at DePaul but we got together after the thing and hanged out at Bar Louis till they kicked us out.

Current Cites for November 2011 is out! You can find the issue here...

I've got two 'cites' this month: one on Libraries moving to Drupal and another on the use (or non-use as the case may be) of Library Subject Guides by college students.

Can it be called research when these are the results?

The analysis revealed that Facebook offers a dynamic environment for academic libraries to cultivate relationships with students. Libraries present information through status messages which suggest who they are and what they do. In addition to being informational, libraries attempt to engage and establish rapport with students through Facebook. The university setting not only creates a context for messages, but also offers a mutual set of experiences and values shared by libraries and students.

Josh Marshall, publisher of Talking Points Memo, looks at traffic on his site and points to the still modest but continually increasing share that 'mobile' is taking:

The additional wrinkle here is that 77% of that mobile traffic you see in the chart is from iOS devices, i.e., iPhones, iPads, iPods, etc. So give or take, around 40% of the visits to TPM come from computers or devices that use an operating system built by Apple. Compare that to 20% only 5 years ago.

The question is, is this really mobile? iPads for example are far more likely to be connected via wireless rather than through a phone company and screen-wise, it's a whole different user-experience. For purposes of analysis, I think it'd be far more helpful -- in fact, increasingly so -- to approach the data as 'mobile' AND 'tablet'.

So the big news is that Adobe is ending Flash development for mobile devices.

Everyone's assuming, for this reason, that Flash's days are numbered. And well they may be, in which case, there's no better time to extol its virtues -- particularly the contribution it's made to our online world -- than now.

It's important to remember that before the Web, most communication online was largely through command line input. In fact, one of the great 'side' achievements of the WWW was that it liberated us from this tyranny, giving us a 'graphical user interface' instead. In the library world, this was the difference between DIALOG which only a consultant could make head or tail of and current versions of Ebsco or Proquest.

Flash (and its predecesso­r, Shockwave) took this a step further by introducing a far higher level of interactivity. It allowed us to click on things, enlarge them, drag them across the browser window. It allowed us to better coordinate various types of media -- images, audio and video -- into a unified user experience. In fact, it did this with video so well that many people nowadays think of Flash as primarily a video delivery system.

And maybe it is, or was. Things move on. What we used to do in Flash, we're slowly being able to accomplish using Javascript, CSS and eventually HTML5. That's the path -- but it was Flash that showed us the way.

The Dominick's at Fullerton and Sheffield had signs on all the entryways saying, 'Sorry, No Masks Allowed in Store!"