LISNews: Librarian News

Is there an easier way to delete a blog other than post by post?

I set up a few forums where you can discuss things that may or may not be related to libraries. There's a Forum To Discuss LISNews and one to Discuss The Podcast.

I also set up an area For Politics and a couple for technology, One On Drupal and another On The Internet.

Let me know if there's something else you'd like to see. -- Read More

Update: It should be noted that due to Daylight Savings Times changes on March 8th, episodes will be posted at 0400 UTC rather than 0500 UTC as they have been.


Sometimes it seems that explaining choices can be difficult. With the expansion of audio programming into being the LISNews Netcast Network, there came some changes. New material is usually released on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. That can be more than what some people can normally digest.

When the switch was made, a deliberate decision was taken to increase available subscription options. Those who were subscribed to what was the LISTen were grandfathered into an "all podcasts" feed. For some that may work well while it may be overwhelming to others. Individual feeds for each regular show have been created in addition to the main "all podcasts" feed. According to the stats from FeedBurner, few have made use of these individual show feeds. They are indeed there and, if you are overwhelmed by so many programs during the week, their use is encouraged. This table breaks out all the subscription options in the most compact form possible:

Some folks may prefer show by show control in their podcatcher rather than a single firehose feed. With a few taxonomy tweaks, accommodating both preferences was possible. Provided you have iTunes installed, clicking any of the links in the far-right column of the table above will take you to the appropriate page in the iTunes Music Store. Right clicking the podcatcher target column's links and selecting "copy link location" will let you subscribe in our programs like Juice or gpodder. Such also allows subscription via Bloglines which appears to be a choice some have made according to the stats by Bloglines itself. The e-mail column's links take you to the process for signing up via FeedBurner to get new posts delivered to you in your e-mail without any rich media attachments but instead links to download rich media as desired.

Allow me to brag for a moment. I was doing some work on the LISHost stats last night and noticed I could see if LISNews has any impact on the biblioblogosphere. You're probably familiar with our "Blogs To Read In..." list we've done for the past few years, it's usually one of the most read stories of the year. I've always been really curious if being on this list in particular makes any difference to a site, mostly because the list takes so long to put together. I'm generally curious if on any given day a link from LISNews brings in any significant number of readers in general, but this post in particular seems like it should mean something.

So I won't name the site, but I was pleasantly surprised at what I saw when I took a look at the stats, a big jump in readership. Here's what I saw on one of the charts:

As you can see there was about a 40%-50% jump in sessions after the list was posted to LISNews. The numbers show an increase of about 300-400 sessions a day, and that has been sustained for several weeks now. -- Read More