LISNews: Librarian News

It's been ages since I've written about LISNews (actually, now that I think about it, It's been ages since I've written about anything). I spent a little time last night getting caught up on what I missed last week while I was gone and saw a troll complaining about a post. A post I thought appropriate and important. I gave up caring what anonymous trolls write quickly after I started LISNews. It's just not worth it. It's not that I don't care what anyone says, I still care about what "real" people have to say about the site, there's just no point in feeding the trolls. I always have welcomed comments and criticisms of the site. But, it's been years since I've seen someone complain about the post being off topic, and it caught me off guard:

BoingBoing Wannabes
Yet another instance of LISNews posting items that really have nothing to do with libraries, librarians or information science. If you're going to stretch and assume the whole world is in the "information" part, why not also include items about Brad and Angelina or how to microwave vegetables?

We've had this debate several times, but it hasn't come up in so long I forget that many LISNews readers are new and missed out on the debates and writing from the days of yore. I've written extensively, and there have been extensive comments on what content is appropriate for LISNews (If I wasn't so lazy I'd dig those up right now, but you're probably a librarian, so you can find them)

If you look at our "About" page you'll see sentence #2 is this: -- Read More

If you're one of the many people who only view LISNews through your feed reader, you'll never notice LISNews now looks completely different.

I've recently grown to dislike the way LISNews looked and operated using the Drupal theme I chose during the switchover to Drupal last year. I'm 110% happy with Drupal, but was much less satisfied with the way the site looked.. Today I've decided to flip the switch and changed back over to the default Drupal theme. Easy theme switching is just one of the many reason I've grown to love Drupal over the past year or so. My call for a custom theme and log got no responses at all, so we'll go with the unoriginal but very functional "Garland" theme until we can come up with something better.

Though I rarely ever get any, feedback is always welcome.

You may or may not know we recently switched from Slashcode to Drupal here at LISNews, and I now think I made a bad decision when I chose the theme. Drupal makes it very easy to change how everything looks, and I'd like to do just that.

But to make sure I get it right this time I need your help. I'm willing to pay up to $150 for an original theme that we can all agree on. If you can't create a brand new theme from scratch, you can just pick one of the many prebuilt themes. I'll enter everyone who chooses an already available theme in a drawing for $25. Hit the Form, leave a comment, or Contact Me and let me know what you think we should look like. If you want to be able to win the $25 I need your email address. We'll narrow it down to our favorite 10 sometime next month, and you'll ALL have a chance to vote for the final design.

If you'd like to hunt for a theme, here are 4 places to get started:

http://drupal.org/project/themes
http://themegarden.org/
http://theme.drupaler.net/
http://themebot.com/website-templates/drupal-themes

If you're thinking of trying to design a theme, read on below for ideas. -- Read More

This is part 3 of an occasional series I've been writing to showoff all the new features @LISNews. In Stuff To Do @ Your LISNews, Part 1: Reading I covered the feeds and other pages that can give you views of the LISNews content you won't see on the homepage. In Part 2: Writing I covered how you can help us create interesting content by writing comments, on your blog and suggesting stories. The full series will cover "reading," "writing," "playing," "networking," "customizing," "finding" and whatever else I can come up with as I go along. Here in part 3 I'll cover all the options listed on your "My Account" link you'll see over on the left hand side when you're logged in. With these options, you can change how LISNews looks, how your blog looks, how to track and subscribe to threads, and even send messages to other LISNews users. -- Read More