LISNews: Librarian News

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

Most Read stories from 2007

[1] -6749 - 10 Blogs To Read In 2007
[2] -4327 - Traits for the 20th Century Librarian
[3] -4115 - Hip-Hop Poetry...Read A Book (w/Explicit Lyrics)
[4] -3336 - Illinois Librarians Plan Internet Shutdown
[5] -3327 - Full-text Searching in Books
[6] -3234 - Two Days Without Dewey
[7] -2791 - Princeton Reviews Top 20 College Libraries of 2008
[8] -2703 - Arizona library to be first to drop Dewey Decimal System
[9] -2535 - Open Source ILS Market Penetration
[10] -2502 - Library Cancels Summer Program

Most commented on stories from 2007

[1] -51 - Illinois Librarians Plan Internet Shutdown
[2] -50 - Howard MD County Library Chooses Koha
[3] -36 - Family Friendly Libraries Awards
[4] -25 - ACLU-WA Library Censorware Lawsuit Article
[5] -25 - Debut of the Espresso Book Machine -- Read More

This is part 2 in our ongoing series of things you can do @LISNews: "Writing."

Part one covered reading. In part one you learned you can read LISNews content via your favorite RSS Reader (http://lisnews.org/rss.xml), email (http://lisnews.org/node/28182) , or even Twitter (http://twitter.com/LISNews). I'll be covering "reading," "writing," "playing," "networking," "customizing," "finding" and whatever else I can come up with in this series. Here in part 2 you'll learn how you can help us create interesting content!

Adding your voice to LISNews is quite simple. There are currently 3 main ways to "write" at LISNews:
1. Comments
2. Your Blog
3. Story Suggestions

1. Comments are the quickest and easiest way to add your voice to LISNews. Every story and blog post should be open to comments. Since authors have the ability to close comments, you may not always be able to shoot your mouth off, but in general you can comment on most everything you read. You'll notice all comment forms do have a "captcha" you'll need to answer. Without that, we'd be deleting spam all day. You're only required to login when you want to write in your blog, for now, at least, anyone can leave a comment without going through the hassle of registering and logging in. Comments get read. Stories with comments are generally read about 3 times more than those without, so the LISNews readership is interested in reading comments. If just leaving a comment isn't enough, be sure to check out your blog. -- Read More