[WEB4LIB] Library blog question

[Wilson,Alane]

Hi Bill: why the long lead time on your blog? One of the beauties of
blogging is you can "open" your blog for business in no time flat. Here
at OCLC, we got the It's All Good blog up in an afternoon...mind you,
that was very plain vanilla (it still is) because none of the 3 authors
had experience or time getting the RSS feed set up. That came later.
Blogging is about writing and communicating, not about systems and
testing, IMO. 

If you expect your blog to be large, I guess an RSS feed for each
category is sensible. But, part of the fun of blogs is the serendipity
of reading stuff you had no idea about and having a feed for preselected
categories kinda defeats the serendipity factor. Just as it does in
library OPACS. :) 

I personally recommend having comments enabled as a blog (I repeat
myself) is about communication which is two-way. To my mind, blogs are a
form of conversation among people who have some interests in common. I
learn things from comments. 

And finally, for me, having notification of new entries coming via email
would be most annoying....that's why I have a gazillion RSS feeds set up
in my reader. But that's me. However, most people will express a
preference for something they are already familiar with rather than an
unknown. If we all catered to this exclusively, we'd still all have card
catalogs. Sometimes it's good to just move along ahead of the crowd and
have them catch up. 



Alane Wilson, MLIS
Senior Library Market Consultant
Marketing and Library Services
OCLC
800-848-5878 x4386


-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Drew, Bill
Sent: Tuesday, February 08, 2005 4:41 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Library blog question


I am planning on bringing our library blog into production late in the
spring or early summer.  It is at http://l2.morrisville.edu/blog.  It
currently contains only test entries and  a few with actual useful
information in them.  I am looking for some way to make them available
via e-mail as new entries are added.  I would like to find some way to
let patrons "subscribe" to a particular category and have them receive
it via e-mail, preferably the actual entry but would settle for a note
saying it had been updated or a new entry added.  Each category has an
RSS feed.  It is running on an old IBM 300GL running Apache2 under
Ubuntu flavor of Linux using blosxom to run the blog.  It is entirely
open source free software.  I do not have comments enabled and probably
will not.  Any suggestions for the e-mail portion?  It must be open
source and free.  I would appreciate any other constructive comments as
well. I have posted this message to web4lib-l and to Linux in Libraries
lists.

Wilfred (Bill) Drew
Associate Librarian, Systems and Reference
Morrisville State College Library
E-mail: mailto:drewwe at morrisville.edu
AOL Instant Messenger:BillDrew4
BillDrew.Net: http://billdrew.net/
Wireless Librarian: http://people.morrisville.edu/~drewwe/wireless/
Library: http://library.morrisville.edu/
SUNYConnect: http://www.sunyconnect.suny.edu/
My Blog:http://www.bloglines.com/blog/BillDrew
 "To teach is to learn twice." - Joseph Joubert