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The Jester Joins Twitter

It was only a few months ago that I was teasing Dan Chudnov for joining Twitter. Now I’ve gone and done it myself. I don’t expect to be using it much, but after observing the “Falls Church, VA” incident yesterday, I thought it would be an useful tool to have at-the-ready. Here’s the story of what inspired it.

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2008 05 07 Comments (2)

DLTJ Updated to WordPress 2.5

Unlike previous upgrades, this left some functionality broken — notably some of the links in the second block under the “about” heading to the left (if you are reading this from http://dltj.org/ itself). But, you know what? — it’s Friday afternoon and all of the important bits are working. I think. So if you see anything odd, please let me know.

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2008 04 04 Comments (0)

SSL for WordPress Admin and the Problem with XMLHttpRequest

The WordPress Codex has documentation for running the login, registration, and administration interfaces on an SSL server. There is even a plug-in that will do much of the heavy lifting for you. I have found both of these methods, by themselves, to be rather unsatisfactory, though, in that admin services that rely on AJAX calls back to WordPress break (such as the periodic saving of drafts). What happens is this:

  1. Plugins will use the ’siteurl’ and/or ‘home’ values in the Options → General admin page, and that value is typically set to the “http://” rather than “https://” address of the blog.
This is a preview of SSL for WordPress Admin and the Problem with XMLHttpRequest. Read the full post (368 words, estimated 1:28 mins reading time)
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2008 03 20 Comments (3)

DLTJ the Target of Real Dead-Tree Junk Mail

Dorothea Salo started a conversation late last year that was picked up by Walt Crawford and others about receiving unsolicited “PR spam” with the expectation that the content of the message will be blogged about. In a related matter, I got my first example today of someone scraping DLTJ to send me junk mail through the U.S. postal service.

Junk Mail to DLTJ’s President, Tom Wilson [?]

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2008 01 28 Comments (3)

DLTJ Updated, Readers Yawn

At least I hope that is the correct headline. I’ve been having some problems with this installation of WordPress lately — in particular, I could no longer activate or deactivate plugins — and the only solution offered in the WordPress codex was to start with a fresh installation of WordPress. Now you know how I spent my free time this weekend. While doing so, I updated the Barthelme theme and along the way gained some really need Semantic Web coolness to the underlying XHTML of the blog pages. The version of Barthelme is still a heavily, heavily hacked one, but hopefully the clean up this weekend will make it possible to keep up with new versions of the underlying theme files without major headaches. I also updated all of the plugins and cleaned out lots of old cruft in the plugins directory and in the theme files. As a result, the pages seem to load faster. Maybe that is just my wishful thinking.

This is a preview of DLTJ Updated, Readers Yawn. Read the full post (471 words, estimated 1:53 mins reading time)
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2008 01 27 Comments (1)

Pointless E-mail Disclaimers

I’ve been collecting disclaimers that appear on the bottom of e-mail messages in a draft post on DLTJ for about a year now — every time I’d get a new one with a different twist, I’d save it anticipating the day would come that there would be enough humor here to share with the rest of you. That day has come. There wasn’t one that disclaimer that finally pushed the publication of this post over the edge; just the accumulation of examples. Identifying information has been removed, but the humor was left intact. If you recognize your institution/company in these examples, please laugh along with me. If you are the lawyer or pseudo-lawyer that drafted these, please do us all a favor and find something else to work on. Like drafting disclaimers for toothpicks and such.

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2008 01 15 Comments (7)

Feeling the Holiday Spirit? Check With Your Lawyers To See if it is Okay

You may have given away your right to feel the holiday spirit via some click-through license dreamed up by an over-exuberant lawyer. Don’t believe me? Anything is possible in the world of contracts; read on…

An in-law sent me a flash animation card from a site called “Elf Yourself” ™ — no link love here, guess the URL or find it in Google — that has some cartoon elves dancing with the images of this in-law’s family’s faces superimposed on the cartoons. It was cute, and I contemplated sending a reply with the faces of my family. As I typically do, I scanned through the Terms of Use that one must accept before starting and the word “universe” caught my eye. “Self,” I said to myself, “why would the word universe be in the Terms of Use?” So went back and read the entire Terms of Use, and the good bit is in “Grant of Rights” (my own emphasis added):

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2007 12 22 Comments (1)

NISO IR Presentation: “The Third Wave of Library Information Stewardship”

On Monday, I had the honor and pleasure of speaking at the NISO workshop “Getting the Most Out of Your Institutional Repository” on the topic of The Third Wave of Library Information Stewardship. The presentation abstract was:

[Academic] Libraries are gearing up for the third wave of information under our stewardship. In the first wave, libraries purchased, made discoverable, and managed information from commercial sources in physical forms (e.g., paper-bound monographs, traditional serials, and microform archives). In the second wave, libraries licensed, made discoverable, and supported information from commercial sources in digital form (e.g., electronic journals, index/abstract databases, and image collections).

This is a preview of NISO IR Presentation: “The Third Wave of Library Information Stewardship”. Read the full post (366 words, estimated 1:28 mins reading time)
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2007 12 05 Comments (2)

Pointless Mid-Week, Mid-Morning Fun

57

How did you do?

Permanent link to this post (7 words, estimated 2 secs reading time)
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2007 11 29 Comments (0)

DLTJ now Running on WordPress 2.3

Last night DLTJ was upgraded to WordPress 2.3. As far as I can tell, everything is working okay, but please let me know in the comments or the comment form if something doesn’t seem right. There were two tricky parts to the upgrade. (Well, three really, if you count the tasks necessary to extract the reminants of the Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) from the theme.) Fortunately, one of them was not the upgrade itself; after abandoning the Gentoo portage ebuild for WordPress, I switched to the Subversion update method. This was the first time I did an ‘svn switch‘ to get the new version, and it worked great.

This is a preview of DLTJ now Running on WordPress 2.3. Read the full post (448 words, estimated 1:48 mins reading time)
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2007 10 17 Comments (0)
From the Disruptive Library Technology Jester (http://dltj.org/), printed on Thursday the 22nd of May 2008 at 4:05:48 PM EDT (-0400). The URL to this page is http://dltj.org/category/metacategory/

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