December 21, 2007

Happy Holidays!


Happy Holidays!
Originally uploaded by desertlibrarian
I hope everyone has a very joyous holiday season, and enters the new year with cheer in their hearts! See you next year...

December 19, 2007

The Year in First Lines

This not-a-meme is popping up everywhere; I'm running from Hedgehog Librarian's posting. You take the first sentence from the first post of each month for the year and post 'em... here goes!

January: Happy New Year, everyone!

February: Damn.

March: The Call for Speakers has been sent out for Internet Librarian.

April: Or, not...

May: OK, late off the block but I just have to share this: Librarian, by HauntedLove. (Still one of my faves!)

June: So, I'm in Denver now...

July: So, American Libraries also wrote me up in the June 20th issue of AL Direct, in the "Actions & Answers" section.

August: ...buried, inundated, overwhelmed...

September: Found via the ever-reliable LISNews, this article over on "Mere Comments" (a blog for Touchstone magazine) titled "The Librarian as 'Professional'" had me alternating between annoyance and agreement.

October: Hat tip to the 3BT blog...

November: (Catching up on my last few posts!)

December
: So.

It seems that I have a habit of starting off my posts rather... shortly. Hmm. Also, so, so, so, ok, and SO. Ha!

Are you geeky enough to be a librarian?

Found quite a while after posting on the Librarian Avengers site, I just took this quiz, and scored a 13. 10-15 = "I’ve got some library school applications under my desk you big dork". Are you geeky enough? (I think I've got to work on it a bit!)

A small bit o'info: The centerpiece of my door art is "Why you should fall to your knees and worship a librarian". I get comments on it all the time... and if they're snarky, I kick the crap out of them.

60° and sunny... I'm such a wimp I'm wearing wool slippers, a long-sleeved T, a long-sleeved woolen shirt, and have a blanket on my lap. It's almost embarrassing.

December 11, 2007

Drupal pause, EDMS head-bashing

So. After such a flurry of happiness with my Drupal problems, I was cheerfully buzzing along getting all my missing documentation uploaded and linked in, and somewhat avoiding the issue of our EDMS. I finally got the go-ahead for reimplementation from our Big Boss but I knew it was gonna be a huge pain, so I postponed, and postponed... until I can't anymore, not really.

So (sigh) I'm putting Drupal on the back burner until the new year. It's fascinating and I'm getting a total kick out of it, but it's not mission-critical the way getting the staff back into the EDMS is. So a few days ago I started spending all my time working on the EDMS, with some good and some bad moments.

The biggest bad moment - and I guess all things considered it's not "bad", just "really really annoying" - is that there's a bug in the export system. So when I exported the workflow, user and group lists, cards, etc etc, it turns out that none of the passwords, permissions, notifications, etc were captured and brought over. Which means - yes, boys and girls, what fun! - that I have to do it ALL OVER AGAIN. So far I'm a day and a half into it and only a third through the workflow. (A bit of history: this is a setup that took over a year to get worked out and in place, so having to recreate all the "who gets notified when what happens" and "who has to approve what for the next step" all at once is not a fun task.)

After I get all this sorted out, then it's client install time, and then the next fun part that's gonna take a lot of time: migrating all the files out of our shared file server and back into the EDMS. On the up side, almost all the staff starts their holiday vacations next week, so if I can get through most of this this week, next week there'll be hardly anyone to inconvenience with file moves - fingers crossed.

All this is a rather long-winded explanation (whine?) about why you won't be seeing any Drupal entries here for a little while. I'll post any librarian image things I come across, but everyone seems to be being rather quiet these days - I haven't seen anything come across in a while now! (If you've seen something, please forward it on to me... thanks)!

It's been raining for five days now, on and off, and it's been make-me-whine cold. ('Course, that doesn't take much, as I pull out sweaters if it drops below 70°...) But the rain is good, and needed, and it's a soft rain that hasn't caused too much flooding, which is a nice change from the summer monsoons. And hey, it's not an ice storm, so yay for that.

December 4, 2007

Happiness!

Thanks to the Drupal Dude, who came through again with flying colors, I got the upload directory schema sorted out, have tarred-and-transferred all my documents, and have just spent the last hour cheerfully linking documents into the existing nodes on the new site. Cross that puppy off the list! w00t!

What I did wrong in the IMCE settings is this: I missed that it's all relative to the main directory "files". By setting "files" again as a shared directory for authenticated users, with subdirectories of blah blah blah, the system was going "Oh, you want that for each authenticated user". Turns out if you put "/" into the shared directory setting and leave all the rest blank, voila, now the proper directories are visible, navigable, and the files in them are linkable, to all authenticated users. Hurrah!

Sadly, I must restrict myself now - half a day on Drupal, half a day on reimplementing our EDMS. I wanna keep cranking on the Drupal pages - linking in documents is a good half of what's left to do, and I'd love to be able to mark those pages as finished! But, all in good time...

It's a lovely sunny 70°. Wish I could send some of this to either coast - have family on both sides that're getting smashed by Mother Nature right now.

December 3, 2007

Please excuse me whilst I bang my head on the wall.

So. I've been wrestling with Drupal again for a few days (this is a spillover post from last week) and I think, like time-zones, I may have some kind of weird internal block about this. Arrgh! I have been trying to tweak the IMCE module to manage non-image files, so that I can get my hundreds of various PDF and PPT files (for the project documentation and meeting materials, respectively) linked into my ever-increasing list of completely ingested pages. Every time I tweak it, it does something new and unexpected, and I can't figure out why. For example, I want sub-folders called "docs", "images", and "logos" in the main shared folder called "files". I now have those three sub-folders in a new shared sub-folder called "files" (as in, it's now files/files/docs ) - which is not what I wanted. If I take out the "files" identified in the IMCE settings page for the shared folder, I then got the three sub-folders under a new folder 2 (my userid). Also not what I wanted. So now I have random folders everywhere except where I want them, and for some reason I can't comprehend, when I'm logged in as admin I can only see the files/u1 folder and not any other folder. (When logged in as myself, I can browse around all these empty folders, so that's a small positive.) Sigh.

I did successfully install the nodeaccess module, and think it'll be very handy for managing access to various bits and pieces of the site - but it still requires some work in the roles arena (such as, properly defining roles and then access permissions for those roles) that, again like the time-zones, I just can't get my head around. Then again, a new staff userID I created successfully blocked access to the selected page, so again, a small positive. (It didn't ask for a login, though.) Sigh.

The poor Drupal Dude is set up for a webcon with me tomorrow morning, to try and work me through these problems I keep having. I hope I don't blow all my remaining contract time with him just on these - I have so many more things to wrestle with. SIGH.

When I finally get a grip on all this stuff (because DAMMIT I will argh grrr) it'll totally be worth it. But, dang, some days I wish we'd just hired someone to do this all for me...! (The PM would never have gone for it but I can dream.)

The sun is setting (yes, really!) and it's 64°. Glad I kept my coat at lunch!