Nashville (6/5-6/9)

I'll be in Nashville for the SLA Conference (involved in most of the Chemistry Division activities) until Wednesday, so I may or may not have an opportunity to post until I return.

Another Example of Academic Library Blogs

Ohio University Libraries now have 4 blogs. One is accessible from their homepage, while two are more for internal users (Systems Status and Reference). The one that caught my attention was the blog they have created for business resources. This is the first business-specific library blog that I have seen.

RSS and Web Site Traffic

Dave Winer's reply to the question, "Would a big media company lose traffic if they supported RSS?". I agree with his assessment that it does increase traffic. I read far more science news articles through the RSS feeds than I did by periodically browsing their Web sites.

"R.S.S." in the New York Times

An article in today's NYT on RSS (which they incorrectly identify as R.S.S.), Fine-Tuning Your Filter for Online Information. [Article is free for 7 days; registration required, or use science-news as ID/password.]

Other than the RSS misspelling, the article is pretty standard. However, it's interesting to note that the writer mentions the New York Times feeds but doesn't not tell the reader how to find them.

RSS: Scotsman.com

Steven Cohen has already mentioned the astonishing list of RSS feeds available from the Scotsman. This is easily the largest collection of feeds I have seen yet from a single news entity. There are nearly 900 feeds from their news, sport and business sections, from the general (International News) to the specific (European Union).

Adding a Search Engine

Micah Alpern offers an easy way for you to create the custom code needed for a search engine on your blog. You simply enter your blog URL and Google license key (which you can get by setting up an account with Google). You also need to have a subscription or Blogroll file set up. Then, you paste the custom code into your template.

I have added this to the right column of this page.

RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters

This RSS guide is more technical: the different versions of RSS, what to know when you're generating your feed, resources for generating and validating the feeds.

Blogrolling

If you're using a blog service that doesn't have a link-managing feature (like Typepad), then blogrolling is an easy way to manage your links without spending lots of time hand-coding HTML in the template. It's a free service with registration, with an upgrade available for additional features.

From the BlogRolling.com site, you can manage (add, edit, delete) your hyperlinks. A line of Javascript code is provided for you to paste into your template, so the changes you make to your blogroll will automatically show up on your site. I have created such a list in the right margin.

Blogging @ SLA in Nashville

Beginning Saturday, InfoToday writers will be blogging live from the SLA Conference.

Trends in Blog Searching

From Christina Pikas, librarian at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The article was originally published in the Mar/Apr 2004 issue of b/ITe, then subsequently republished in llrx.com.