I’ve just changed my web site rather radically. I did this to make it easier to find things (hopefully) and easier to maintain. The blog remains pretty much untouched (for now) except for the addition of some posts. I had to do this because now the entire site is pretty much run from the WordPress database.
The biggest change is the collapsing of the Participatory Librarianship site into my own site. Since this is my major research focus, I figured it was time to put myself on the line and closely associate my research with the project. I’m hoping it makes my site more useful than just going to get a copy of a vita or a presentation. Now when I update the participatory site or my own, both are updated. In a few days going to PTBed.org will show you the same splash page minus my information. If you go to www.DavidLankes.org you get the splash page plus my professional information.
My former site looked minimalist, but in fact the search engine behind it made things complex and the pages for presentations a bit overwhelming. I hope this makes it simpler.
So, major changes:
- Participatory Librarianship site and Personal site have been collapsed
- Standard list displays for publications and presentations
- Interactive timelines added for most personal pages
- RSS feeds integrated into pages to highlight relevant news and announcements
- Expanded biography…now with more bragging
- Targeted search on relevant pages
- Quick link to see and add comments to most sections of the site
As always if you see something screwy please let me know. I highly recommend using Firefox over IE. IE is still flakey with CSS and the timelines simply work better in Firefox.
I’m sure I’ll be tweaking for some time, but let me know how I can make it better.
For those technically oriented (or my digital library students) some tech details:
Bog Software: WordPress
Search Engine (and Web Links): Sphider
Timelines: Simile (http://simile.mit.edu/timeline/)
All of these packages were tied together with PHP. The individual non-blog pages were created with PHP tapping directly into the WordPress database.