Tweaking

I like to rearrange furniture. That's not really feasible in my office (limited outlets), so I tend to rearrange websites (blogs, forums, etc.) I administrate when I get to feeling like something needs to be moved around.

I didn't do a ton of set-up on this blog yesterday - picked a template that I could live with, and such - so I started fiddling around with the gadgets today. One of the things I decided to add and keep (so far) is the RSS feed for the other blog I write under this log-in. (Three posts in the past six weeks... hopefully I can get it moving more.)

One of the things I went through setting up but didn't keep was a list of links to all the other currently registered blogs for this program. It was great to set up because it meant I went and read what everyone else has written so far, but it occurred to me that, if all 150 participants register, it will be way too long and scrolly.

Past experience says scrolly is bad; people don't like to have to scroll all the way down to the bottom to get to something, the same way that above the fold/below the fold matters in print newspapers. I find the scrolly problem to be true for a lot of news sites that I read; they tend to put the newest stories at the top for that reason. If I have to scroll too far from the top of the page, I don't really bother to go all the way down to see what's there.

Of course, this conflicts pretty directly with my tendencies towards verbosity. I've found that 3-to-5-page-paper is a length pretty well ingrained in me from all those assignments in high school and my undergrad. Three to five pages doesn't really sound long (double-spaced, right?) until you realize your medium isn't 8 1/2" by 11" paper, but a probably 5" column down a screen. Scrolly.

The Blogs in Plain English video has me thinking about my high school journalism class: the funnel shape for stories, putting the most important information towards the beginning, and the later paragraphs are all details the loss of which won't make the story unintelligible if they have to be cropped for space. I was never good at that, probably because I've also never been good at drafting; most of my writing is my train of thought in action, and I never learned to think in a journalistic style. Given the whole problem of scrolly, the journalism concepts are probably good to keep in mind: how many people actually read to the end of a long post?

Perhaps this is why, in my high school journalism class, I was the copy editor. I proofread, cropped, and assembled, but I didn't write a lot of content. We didn't have journalism software in my class: the school paper was all assembled on large sheets with a wax gun. If there was something last-minute to go in, I had to pull apart the sheets, rearrange, and make it fit, occasionally slicing off a paragraph here or there to make it work. I like to tweak, to rearrange, and although the list of links was pulled because it would be scrolly, I'm sure I'll find another gadget to fiddle with here before the course of Things is done.

Thing #1: Blogging

Howdy to all the people Learning with CDLC!

This is Thing #1, answering:

Tell us a little bit about who you are, what library you work for, why you’re taking part in this program and what you’ve learned this week.

I'm Katherine over at WKM, the Van Wagenen Library at SUNY Cobleskill. I'm the Circulation & Interlibrary Loan Librarian here, and like a lot of ILL people, I recognize libraries by their OCLC code. I don't know why Cobleskill is WKM, especially since so many of the other SUNYs are X's or Z's, but there we are. (To add other levels of confusion, our CDLC courier code is SUCO, which is an acronym the SUNY College at Oneonta down I-88 from us uses for itself.)

SUNY Cobleskill, if you're not familiar with us, is the State University of New York College of Agriculture and Technology at Cobleskill. We teach agriculture, culinary arts, hospitality & tourism management, early childhood education, business and computer science, and a variety of other technologies, which has led to our library having a diverse and fascinating collection. Our histotechnology program is, so far as I know, unique in the SUNY system. (You're probably wondering how early childhood education slipped into a technology school as a major area of instruction; it was added early on as part of the home economics angle of technology instruction, and it's a huge program here. They bring the little kids over to the library to see our children's book collection.)

So, as I've said, I'm Katherine. I came to Cobleskill about 6 years ago now, doing part-time reference about 6 months out of library school, and I like it here so much I jumped at the opportunity to become full-time when the previous Circ/ILL librarian left about two and a half years ago. I'm now tenure-track, with all the joys that entails. I did all my degrees over at SUNY Albany - history B.A., M.S.I.S., history M.A., in that order.

I live over in Schenectady, so if there's anyone from SCPL doing this program, I'd just like to apologize for my serial tardiness returning things, but dealing with fine appeals from the library side of things, I'm never going to argue about paying my own.

My husband and I bought a house in December (moving in December: at least it wasn't January), and I've actually got ground now that isn't sand to try to plant things in, so working at Cobleskill is coming in really handy - we have a huge gardening and agriculture section. I grew up in Indiana, so waiting so long for the putting-stuff-in-dirt-outside season to start here is still a bit unfamiliar.

I signed up to do this program for a variety of reasons:

• Despite my personal Apple boycott, an iPad would still be kind of neat. (Not that I ever win anything, but still.)
• I have blogs, but I don't blog nearly as often as I'd like to; I'm hoping this will inspire me.
• Did I mention that I'm tenure-track? I do all the continuing education I can afford, and the price for this was awesome.
  
• Poking around the 23 Things other places have done, not all of the Web 2.0 stuff listed is stuff I've tried out, so yay! new stuff to try!
• I'm an introspective geek. Writing about me exploring technology should be fun. :)

Writing this as early in the week as I am, I haven't had a chance to look around at what other people have written yet, so most of what I've learned this week is the two blog sites I haven't used before, Posterous and Edublogs. I've used WordPress in the past, but as the downloaded and installed on my own domain version, and I switched to Blogger at some point because it tied in neatly with my Gmail account and because I wasn't having to update software. I decided to use it again since I could just tack another blog onto my same log-in. Blogger blogs port around easily, so if I decide at some point to kill this blog, I can just fold the posts over into my other blog on this account, and they'll just fall neatly into its archives.

So that's me, and why I'm here! I'm looking forward to seeing where this goes.