Petty Larceny?
Did a bit of a CSS makeover on our OPAC this week. Doubt she realizes I “borrowed” her work but thanks to Laura Guy at the Colorado School of Mines for the CSS code. Her post on a Voyager listserv prompted my interest in fixing our pretty-ugly standard fonts and poking around their catalog I found the CSS I needed to fix things.
That “view source” button is a really wonderful invention, isn’t it? Ever speculate on how much slower development/evolution of web design would have been if web authors had always been able to hide their markup? Perhaps that explains why technologies like Flash haven’t been more widely adopted and stretched–you can’t learn very much just looking at someone’s SWF file.
Intranet moving…
Moved our intranet from a old E3000 (Solaris) machine over to OS X server today. I’m trying to free up some of our older servers so we can surplus them before moving in a week or so. Had quite a time getting .htaccess working properly with the Apple implementation of Apache. Seems Apple’s version of mod_auth is just a bit different and the “generic” mod_auth is commented out in the httpd.conf file that ships with Tiger Server 10.4.x
Amazon -> Opac linking
I serve on the Board of Trustees for the Loudoun County Public Library, working through my second and final four year term. I do it both as a bit of public service to my community and as a way to help insure that the system protects basic rights like intellectual freedom and the freedom to read. I’m also interested in the technologies that public libraries are using and this new development at the Loudoun Public Library system is really nice–a greasemonkey script that enables links between Amazon and items in the library’s OPAC. I worked up a similar system for Mason’s catalog a year or so ago, but LCPL has really gone far beyond what that extension attempted. Not only do they show whether the library owns the book, they also give information on its circulation status…even a link to place a hold request for the item.
I think I’m most impressed by the tech staff’s assumption that they can put something as geeky as a greasemonkey extension to Firefox “above the fold” on their home page.