Blogs

This video/tutorial was initially started as a presentation for the Denver Open Media Conference this weekend. Since we had a snowstorm on the day of my session, I decided to do this as a screencast here instead. My description of the session and the screencast appear below:

My teen services team is currently developing a new strategic plan to direct the next several years of service. In an attempt to keep our strategic plan feasible we've decided on four seemingly simple goals. When I first started this position 5 years ago, we created the first ever teen services strategic plan for this district and unfortunately were mandated by the higher-ups to design our plan as a mirror to the library's plan. The plan became a behemoth that was quickly set aside and referred to only in reports and presentations.

Last Saturday was the Colorado Teen Literature Conference in Denver, CO. Attending were 300 teachers, librarians and teens. I'm always surprised at just how many teenagers actually come to this conference. Get up early on a Saturday to discuss literature with your teachers and librarians, what? I'm not sure that I would have been such a diligent student when I was that young.

For a while now, I have felt guilty for not having a professional blog. I consider myself a creative and forward-thinking librarian and while my library has had a teen blog and I read several blogs daily for my own professional development, I have resisted starting my own blog for rather lame and slightly self-deprecating reasons. Finally, I have decided to stop thinking of a blog as an option but rather as a professional necessity. So, what do I do and what should I write about?

I'm a big fan of using exposed filters in my administrative views that I build. One thing that had escaped me until today was that there isn't always a really easy way for my users to get back to square one. I need a reset button. Don't we all?

I did some searching around and some experimenting. It turns out that you can do this really easily in a custom module just using a hook_form_alter(). You can see the result in the screenshot below. Easy reset button.

I was working today on creating a menu that is role-based. This is for the new Jones International University (http://www.jiu.edu) content management system, which is going to be Drupal-based. I was a little surprised that you can't easily do this when you're creating your individual menu items (say who gets to see what), but it's actually not too hard with a bit of PHP code added into the theme layer (in your page.tpl.php file). The current header is shown in the screenshot below.

So we decided at Jones that we needed to use the Multiselect module that was built for Drupal 5. We had used it in the past, but it looks like its previous maintainers have abandoned it. Too bad because it looks like a lot of people other than us found this sort of CCK widget to be very useful.

I spent the past couple of days working on it and I can finally say that it has been completely overhauled and is now working with the Drupal 6 form api (FAPI) and the latest version of CCK.

Apparently these are the topics I've been talking about the most on Twitter over the past two years. Interesting way of visualizing it. This was created using Tweetake.com and Wordle.net.

So it's interesting creating my first Drupal site for personal use. I've built a lot of sites in Drupal for the Jones Knowledge Integration Group already, but Jill and I decided to set up a new personal blogging site using Drupal. We haven't got a lot of features so far, but we're having fun getting started with it. We know we want blogging at the very least. Probably podcasting as well, but that's not set up quite yet. It's nice to know that you have a public playground available to try new things.