Tom Roper's Weblog

Blogging hiatus

I'm afraid family illness means I may not be as regular in my posts as usual.

"Here is true fame"

For I discover this blog has been listed in the excellent Cites and Insights. The latest issue contains Perspective: Looking at Liblogs: The Great Middle - a look at 213 library-person weblogs. Walt Crawford is very through in his approach and assesses the blogs he looks at thus:
Starting date (from internal evidence)
Frequency of posts, March-May 2006
Number of comments, March-May 2006
Comments per post
Total length of posts, March-May 2006
Average length of posts
Blogrolls
Typeface and alignment
Colour usage
Creative Commons
Software

Here's my entry:

Tom Roper’s Weblog
Tagline: “ ‘…an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge…’
R.B. Sheridan The Rivals, 1775.” Author: Tom
Roper. Established October 2005. First March title:
“CILIP National Councillor election results.” Most
comments (4): “Beach huts: I speak out.” [showing I have my finger on the pulse of the issues that matter to this great profession of ours-TR]
Metrics: Many posts (70), comments (19), long
overall (6,654), terse posts (95 words per post).

Actually it was established long before October 2005: my first post, on the death of Alan Davidson, was in December 2003.

Search and evidence based practice

It is, I know, the last refuge of the desperate, but blogging about odd search terms people have used to find your blog is not always pointless. So let it be know that today somebody found my site from Google with the search string "evidence based practice" + bollocks. The syntax suggests a professional at work.

Technorati Tags: google

The other MLA

Just as the real MLA is about to start in Phoenix, I came across, on the Valve, a fascinating session at the other one:
Meet the Bloggers; or, Another MLA Panel You Dread Attending

Share your OPML

Share your OPML is very useful. I agree with Paul Miller of Panlibus though, that a feature to allow one to see not only the feeds one has in common with others but also those not shared.
I'm astonished that the most prolific subscriber reads more than 8000 feeds. I thought mine were unmanageable at just under 1000.

Technorati Tags: opml

Job search

Inspired by the example of Tom Raferty, cited by Hugh McLeod on gapingvoid, I've made my cv more prominent on the site and added a Hire Me link. I put the cv up some weeks ago, but have had no great interest from employers; this may make it more prominent.
I cannot resist the opportunity to reproduce one of Hugh's brilliant cartoons here, which seemed to me rather apposite:

Technorati Tags: cv, jobsearch, resumé

Del.icio.us import from browser bookmarks

The news that del.icio.us now allows users to import bookmarks from other browsers is excellent stuff. The import tool evens applies tags and leaves imported bookmarks as unshared, for editing before they appear in public. One enhancement: if it could also validate the bookmarks that would be even better. I've discovered a lot of dead links among mine.

Swicki

I've just added a swicki to this blog; the best definition of a swicki I can find is on the OSS4lib site. Mine is a little crude, but may develop. I was torn between Eurekster and ZoomClouds, but went for the former in the end: Zoom Clouds does the tag cloud, but not search, as far as I could tell.
Post scriptum: I've taken it of for the time being. The Eurekster version seems to require to be populated manually, rather than build it organically from the blog, tags and searches. Also it slowed the pages down no end.

Blogs and Social Media Forum

I have had another e-mail from these characters (the ones who want £350 for a day's conference). "Dear Dear Mr Roper" they write, obviously trying to butter me up. Double endearments will not touch my flinty heart, I'm afraid.

Geoffrey Chaucer Hath A Blog

Geoffrey Chaucer Hath A Blog cast in the form of an advice column. I discovered this by way of languagehat