Year: 2011

  • Jessamyn West to speak at Wilson Library

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    Without a Net: Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide

    Mark your calendars!

    At the invitation of the Special Libraries Association, Jessamyn West, author, librarian, and community technology instructor, will grace our halls on November 18, 2011 to talk about her work teaching computer skills to novices, and helping small and rural libraries manage the transition to a digital world.

    Much of this work is described in her latest book, Without a Net: Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide. You can find out more about Ms. West at her website, Librarian.net hosted here at ibiblio. She also moderates and maintains a community question and answer resource at ask.metafilter.com, and describes her other goings-on at her website jessamyn.com

    Jessamyn will be speaking a 1pm at the Wilson Library Pleasants room on November 18, 2011.

    We’ll see you there!

  • Lo! ’tis a gala night….

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    …Within the lonesome latter years!
    An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
    In veils, and drowned in tears,
    Sit in a theatre, to see
    A play of hopes and fears,
    While the orchestra breathes fitfully
    The music of the spheres.

    This is the first stanza of the expectedly macabre, somewhat depressing, but beautifully crafted poem The Conquerer Worm by the great Edgar Allan Poe. The poem describes the inevitability of death, but on this dreary Halloween, revelers will pour onto the streets and into the bars and parties of their respective towns and celebrate–life, silly costumes, ghosts,  ghouls, probably more than a few occupy wall street protesters and Jersey Shore cast members, and of course, spirits. Spirits, that is, of a character most transformative to one’s disposition…

    If you can’t make it to the masquerades, then do yourself a favor and don’t let the mood of the evening pass you by. Pour yourself a glass of Amontillado,  and curl up by a fire with your e-reader and look through Project Gutenberg’s collection from the likes of Poe, Hawthorne, Shelly and Stoker [Linked content no longer available].

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  • WordPress Multisite (using subdomains) + Shibboleth authentication

    The WordPress Shibboleth plugin advertises WPMU support but does not seem to work with a WP 3.x Multisite/Network installation. Below is a patch to version 1.4 of the Shibboleth plugin and basic setup details needed to support sitewide Shibboleth authentication.

    Before we begin, I assume you’re already familiar with installing and configuring Shibboleth, WordPress, and the WordPress Shibboleth plugin. If you haven’t already set up WordPress or a Shibboleth SP, either bribe someone who has or find a carafe of coffee and come back in a day or two.

    Download the patch (wp-shibboleth-1.4-multisite.patch.zip)

    What’s in the patch?

    • Support for WP Multisite/Network with subdomains. I didn’t try this with a subdirectory implementation and don’t expect it to work.
    • A setting to specify the common email domain for users’ email addresses as a combination of their shibboleth username + “@” + the common email domain
    • Fixes for localization/gettext support.
    • HTML markup fixes on the admin control panel page

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