Assignment 1

Part 1: Blogging
I found this part of the assignment refreshingly fun and straight forward to use. I created a blog named librarytechnogeekery.blogspot.com which took virtually no time at all to get up and running. I already had a google account and understood how blogspot basically worked. I had fun fine tuning the settings and backgrounds and then moved onto adding gadgets and getting a feel for the different pertinent and not so pertinent add ons that I could have on my blog. I had never used the "follow blog" button before and got a little confused as to what the difference between rss feeds and following blogs was. It's still a little gray. :)

http://librarytechnogeekery.blogspot.com/

Part 2: RSS feeds

The regular rss feed was no problem to do but creating a stand alone rss feed on rapidfeeds was a little confusing to me. I created an account, tied it to my blog but didn't realize that I wasn't finished until I put in specific blog posts and a description of those posts. I think I understand it better now. http://feeds.rapidfeeds.com/23471/ http://librarytechnogeekery.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Part 3: Online RSS aggregator
I have been using the Thunderbird rss aggregator so the google aggregator was new to me. It's actually easier to use than my thunderbird aggregator and I set it to my default. I now have lots of feeds for my classmates blogs, the MLIS blog and library blogs that I've discovered through this class.

Part 4: Wiki
Describe main characteristics of the library and goal of the wiki: This wiki is for a large public library system (Dekalb County Public Library) that contains 26 individual branches and serves a major metro Atlanta county. The wiki is to be used for staff purposes only and will remain internal. The goal of the wiki is to create both uniformity and information sharing between the branches in regards to both policy and workflow issues.

Identify the library's requirements for a wiki: Nearly 200 employees will have access to this wiki with varying degrees of technical expertise. The software must be simple to use and no code writing should be required in order to post to the wiki. It should be reasonably flexible, large and easy to use. Pages should be archived so that employees can review information as necessary. The software will be maintained by a small staff of IT folks but will primarily be worked on by the library staff. Due to budget constraints, it needs to either be Open Source or low in cost.

Choose a wiki that meet the library's requirement: After narrowing it down to a choice between PhpWiki, MojoMojo and WackoWiki, I chose PhpWiki because it contained the following criteria: installable software, WYSIWYG editing, page history, uses a database, and is free/OSS.