Blogging and Controlled Vocabulary

02/07/2014 1 Comment

So I am considering a blog redesign over on Comparative Geeks. I did a redesign on this blog, and changed the home page to be more like a website than a blog front-page. In the end, I think that makes this more like my portfolio or personal site than just a personal blog, or a re-purposed blog from school. Which to be fair, it was. So I went through each individual post, added the “more” function to most, moved my categories into tags, and added new categories.

Which was a lot of work, but it did what I wanted, which is changed the look and feel of this site. To be fair, I don’t think anyone actually uses it as I have it set up – I think mainly people read individual posts as shared from the WordPress reader or social media, but hey. Not like I’m putting up a ton of content here.

…Unlike Comparative Geeks. Where there are now over a year’s worth of 6-posts-a-week. And I’m thinking about similar sorts of changes, at least on the individual post levels: moving some categories to tags, and cleaning up the categories. We currently have 32 categories, and a number of them are things that more likely function as tags on other blogs – and that’s how people browsing through blogs might find us! What you define as these tags also carry over to other social media sites, especially, I have found, Tumblr.

So let me explore a few of the challenges I see in store for Comparative Geeks, dealing with the tags and categories in particular – more to come on some of my other plans for Comparative Geeks! Read on for some good blogging food for thought.

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Reviewing the Reference Interview

01/23/2014 1 Comment

Tonight I start my first evening at the reference desk, and I was brushing up on the Reference Interview and found an old assignment I had done on the subject. It looks like it had been my duty to read everyone’s write-ups and post a collection of our experiences. We had played at “secret shoppers” talking to librarians, seeking their help with a question of our own choosing.

It looks like I had a lot of data to go through! Lots of insights. I am going to share this write-up, figuring it’s helpful insight about one of the more important and constant aspects of any librarian job: reference. I am making a couple of edits, but for the most part, with a bit of intro here, I figure it’s pretty good. This is something originally written by me, and the data is mainly from students in my course with me. If I had kept up my blogging more while getting the degree, this might have ended up posted far sooner! I do have a couple of references, and I will leave those as-is.

It’s also kind of fun to read it and think that it’s definitely in my same “voice,” something that is solidifying more with more and more time spent writing on a constant basis! Read more of this post

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What goes on at a Library when it’s late?

01/16/2014 Leave a comment

That is all.

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10 Great Things From Blogging This Year

12/31/2013 Leave a comment

It was nearly a year ago that my wife and I planned and began to build our blog, still going strong today. We’ve kept with 6 posts a week, 3 each, with the occasional guest post. We’ve used a variety of post types, like I learned about in my class on blogging – though perhaps not as many as we could.

We do a great deal of reviews, talking through the things in our life we’re experiencing – mostly the geeky things. But then, what might one expect from a blog called Comparative Geeks?

From a blogging perspective, we’ve seen some great results, though there’s more that could happen. We are happy with where we are at, not planning on this as a form of income, or necessarily caring about being a big thing. But that doesn’t mean that it’s not nice to get noticed, seen, read, shared, and the community-forming we’ve seen this year has been great. So let me walk you through ten great moments for Comparative Geeks this year!

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Publicize – Results from my First Test

09/16/2013 2 Comments

So, as I mentioned yesterday, I was testing out Publicize on multiple channels. I think the test was pretty successful. The Twitter feed here on the site does not show the post to Twitter, as advertised – which is good, because otherwise you would see the post, with a Tweet next to it telling you the post was there. As I’ve mentioned before, Twitter is less of a reader and more of… something else. One of its better uses being perhaps its ability to feed into other things, like the WordPress sidebar, or Facebook. More on that below.

I ran into one snag: When shared on Tumblr, the blog post then kicked in the automatic share there – effectively, Tumblr’s version of Publicize. This resulted in two Tweets. The one from Tumblr also ended up in the sidebar here on the blog. It looks like my Facebook had been logged out on Tumblr, otherwise I imagine it would have ended up there twice as well. This was easily solved – I have turned off these automatic shares on Tumblr, but am still linked in where I should be able to share when I want to from within Tumblr.

From here, I have some further thoughts on Publicize… check out what I’m thinking, and then maybe let me know your experiences with it! (Also, I have just learned how to embed a tweet: http://en.support.wordpress.com/twitter/twitter-embeds/…)

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