Category: Library Monk News

Movable Type has always had a problem, at least when using Internet Explorer 6 as your web browser, which most people are. Comments have this habit of being invisible when you first view them, only to reappear when highlighted with the mouse or the page is reloaded. Turns out this is an easily fixed CSS bug. Details on how to fix this problem are over at King of Fools.

Update: Sadly that fix doesn’t seem to work all the time. However stripping the CSS out of the comment form does seem to work. Instructions on how to do this are again from King of Fools.

In addition to fixing the comments I have also added a custom icon to the site. So instead of seeing the default icon next to librarymonk.com, you will now see a blue “LM”. Instructions on how to do this are at Web Page Design for Designers. I used a freeware icon editor called GoldIcon to create the Library Monk icon.

I started up a photo blog at http://www.librarymonk.com/gallery/. I’m just experimenting right now so I can figure out the best way to do things, i.e. how best to upload, to thumbnail or not, etc. Anyone have any tips?

Update June 15, 2004: The photo blog is no more. For pictures of my life try Stephanie’s Gallery.

Lots of stuff is going on here in my little corner of the universe. I updated Movable Type to the latest version and gave the blog a little facelift. I bought Spam Bully and upgraded to the latest version of ACDSee. I got introduced to a new people networking site called orkut a few days ago. It’s interesting but I’m not sure what the point is.

In other blog news I joined the staff of authors over at LISNews and posted my first story today. Just look for stories posted by Dan G. And in brick and motar library news, looks like Knoxville is thinking about a new library. From an article in the Knoxville News Sentinel ; “When Library Director Larry Frank talked about the need for a new library last fall, he noted that by the standards of the American Library Association, the current library, which was built in 1971, is only one-third to one-half the size that it should be.” Yep, sounds like it it might be time for a new library.

And for those of you wondering how I’m doing, I’ve gotten my neck brace off finally and have managed to walk a few feet with help. So things are looking ok on the recovery front.

I am once again in the land of high speed Internet access! My DSL line from Sprint is finally active and working so getting online is no longer an ordeal. But I’m still one finger typing. Can’t have it all I guess.

On October 26, 2003 I was in a serious car wreck. I suffered a broken neck which has left me partially paralyzed. I am currently only typing with one finger, which makes blogging a challenge, but I am back.

Well I had my first experience with comment spam yesterday so I did what any good Movable Type user would do, I installed MT Blacklist. I haven’t had any new comments yet, so I don’t know how well it works yet. If you want to install it, I’d wait until Monday when the new version comes out.

I also donated to Movable Type this week. I probably wouldn’t have except the MT site says, “Each donation for Movable Type will be credited to the purchase of Movable Type Pro when that product is released.” And I get a little extra publicity for the site since it will now show up on the MT site as “Recently Updated” when I post.

Well I finally got Blogrolling set up here. Doesn’t look any different from what I had before, but that’s by design. I decided to get Blogrolling Gold, both to support a cool service and for the ability to have multiple rolls.

Given time and desire I could have gotten most of the functionality for free but why reinvent the wheel? That’s the same reasoning behind why I’m no longer running my own server and moved to LISHost . Someone else can do it better than I can and it leaves me time for other things, like actual blogging and the never ending Ph. D. studies. And as an aside thanks to everyone that is visiting my site from librarian.net.

After some tweaking of the the design, Library Monk is relaunched. I got all the previous posts typed in but I left off the comments. (what few there were) Let me know what you think.

The Blogstyles design just wasn’t working for me. So I’m using Neil Turner’s design for now. Usable, looks good and lets me concertrate on the blogging until I figure out MT’s design workings.

Mark Pilgrim has some cool MT stuff. So does Neil Turner. And I found MTPlugins which is pretty cool. And this Movable Type template tutorial is quite good.

Maybe I’ll get MT figured out enough to make it look nice.