WebJunction

Also, feel free to introduce yourself here!

I'm Laura Crossett, and I live in a tiny town in Wyoming and run the Park County Library System website. I've been running my blog on WordPress for several years, so it seemed like the natural choice when I was casting around for something to use for our library website. I'm psyched about sharing ideas with other people who are doing the same thing!

Oh, how bizarre. I will try to join my group, then! And don't worry, I don't think we're checking anyone's cred. Interest and a willingness to make mistakes strike me as plenty of cred.

I'm Sia Stewart, director of a small public library in Massachusetts (pop. 12,500). I use WordPress for our staff website. I don't have a lot of time to put into it, and I'd love to learn from other librarians to speed up my learning a little. We're thinking about using it for our public website as well.

Hi all! My name is Donna and I work at the Livermore Public Library in California. We currently use WordPress for our teen page. It's been a good tool and while we don't get much in the way of comments from our patrons - the number of hits/visits has been increasingly steadily since we started.

I'm looking forward to getting ideas from others as well as sharing!

This is a great idea for a group - Thanks!!
Donna

We're finally setting up a (small) YA area in our library. We've had a very stagnant page on our website for teens & in conjunction with our new area, we're doing an overhaul on the teen page (called "ya!") I want to include a blog where our teens can write in comments or begin a discussion. I was planning on using Wordpress, since I used that for my blog during an Overdrive conference. I'd like to know if anyone else is doing this, and if there is a way to moderate (or if necessary - edit) comments before they are posted.

Hi Susan,

We moderate our comments (though we don't have a lot.... yet). There are a couple of ways to do that with Wordpress. You can set it so that all comments have to be approved before they appear (this is what we do). You can also set it up so that the author can post directly once they have a previously approved comment, or to require the comment author to fill out a name and email.

Wordpress also seems to be pretty good at detecting "spam" posts. You have the option to review these, and if they are not spam you can redirect them.

Hi Donna,

Sorry I've been so long in responding to you -- school just started here last week and it has been a little hectic!

We just did a bookmark promoting the idea that our "virtual branch" is always open even while the Cody library is closed in preparation for its move to the new library. We haven't seen any real uptick in visitor numbers, but we'll see.

I'm also trying to encourage everyone to put the URL of the site in their email signature, on any sign they make, etc., as a way of getting it into people's heads.

Laura

Wow, that's a nice looking implementation! Color me impressed!

I pretty much gave up on widgets because of how much I wanted to customize the sidebar on our site. What widgets would you be interested in having? (Not that I can actually code such things--just curious!)

Hi and welcome, Greg! Your horror site is great--I am a wimp and will most likely not be reading anything on your lists, but they are an excellent resource. It looks like you've got several people contributing to the blogs for your library, which is also great. I'd be interested in hearing how you do training and how you designate or schedule or whatever--who makes the decisions about content and when it gets posted and that sort of thing. It's one thing we're still struggling with on our webteam.

I apologize for this rather late response--I'm trying to get caught up on all kinds of stuff here, and I finally got to your post!

My name is David Mattison and I've been a WordPress user since June 2003 when I started blogging under my own domain davidmattison.ca; my Ten Thousand Year Blog was at http://www.davidmattison.ca/wordpress. Between July 2002 and July 2003 I also ran Radio as my blog authoring/publishing system and that blog, the first iteration of my Ten Thousand Year Blog, is still available at http://radio.weblogs.com/0110793/. In September 2008 the hosting company I was with had a catastrophic security failure and since they no longer wanted me as a customer, I decided to switch to WordPress.com and reopened my Ten Thousand Year Blog at http://digitalarchivist.wordpress.com. Because the site I had hosted was still getting a lot of hits, I reopened it as a semi-active site in late September 2009.

The two other active WordPress.com blogs I have are The Doomsday Blog (http://doomsdayblog.wordpress.com) and David Mattison, Ideas, Images & Info Matters (http://davidmattison.wordpress.com).

WordPress.com seems no longer able to compete in my mind with the new capabilities of Google's Blogger. One huge difference that's even more important to me is the ability within Blogger to incorporate "third-party functionality or other code" such as Amazon content and Google AdSense, which has its own "gadget", the equivalent of a WordPress plugin/widget. If you are thinking of using WordPress.com I would recommend setting up a throwaway account on both WordPress.com and Blogger and comparing them. Of course if you're hosting your own WordPress installation then you have the full panolpy of plugins and themes with which to enhance your site.

And now for a little infomercial (you can stop reading if this offends you): if your library finds it needs to hire a WordPress or content management system/social media consultant, I'd be delighted to discuss your needs. I recently retired from the Royal British Columbia Museum where among my last official duties was to help with planning and policy around the use of social media. I've been a tireless promoter of Internet technology ever since I was first introduced to it in 1991.