Our DVD player died after over six years of heavy use. The only logical replacement was a PS3 since it can play DVDs (and upscale them), Blu-ray discs and of course games. This will probably be the last physical media device we buy. Crazy!

The system came with a copy of “Spider-man 3″ on Blu-ray that is hopefully going to find its way into the NPPL’s collection. Once we get this cataloged correctly I’ll likely buy a few more Blu-ray titles. Just enough so that we can advertise that we have a small collection. Not only will it serve as a good experiment to see if the discs are popular, it will also serve as good marketing for the NPPL. Even if swarms of people don’t have Blu-ray players (yet) it will showcase the library as a place with exciting new stuff that understands what’s happening in the larger information world. All that for $200? A bargain! It doesn’t always take much to try new things.

We’ll make our Blu-ray discs non-holdable for a month, just like our other new materials. Yes, this slightly diminishes the spirit of library sharing and maybe inconveniences some non-NPPL patrons. However, it drives some in house traffic to our relatively new beautiful library. While that sounds like a library-centered policy (bad!), it isn’t *fully* library-centered. The non-holdable period keeps new and popular titles around for people in North Plains to browse. This makes residents of North Plains happy and increases the library’s “placeness,” making it interesting and vital.

I’m so pleased. The NPPL finally has a wireless network up and running. It is blazingly fast. Soon, the entire downtown strip of North Plains is going to be covered by the library’s wireless network. Here’s how it happened.

I would have plugged a wireless router into the network my first week at the library but it wasn’t that simple. Our interwebs come to us via a county sponsored pipe that doesn’t allow wireless networking. Hrm. My options for getting a wireless network up and running were to either bring in a second internet connection or wait for the library coop to offer it as a service to their member libraries. The second option was appealing in certain ways but was going to require a) more time and b) money for some equipment. Enough money to pay for a second internet connection for quite a while, in fact.

NPPL volunteer and North Plains resident Mark Lipscomb owns an IT consulting company called Complete Network Care and naturally is into techie things. One afternoon a few weeks back I was telling him about the situation regarding our lack of wifi and he said his company might be willing to sponsor a DSL connection for the library. I was pretty happy about this! We continued the conversation and I told him about a vision I had for a library sponsored wifi network throughout the main commercial strip of North Plains. His ears perked up and he mentioned that one of his clients, Wireless Applications Consulting, sets up, among other things, big wireless networks. I was very interested in this!

Drew Piriak of Wireless Applications Consuling, Mark and I met at the library the second week of December. We had an easy conversation and brokered a solution that satisfied all parties:

• A two-tier wireless network would cover the library and downtown strip of North Plains. One would be fast and free, one would be faster and not free (profits going to Drew and/or Mark).
• A small antenna would be put on the roof of the library. We’d contact a local business (with a tall building!) and ask if they’d let us put another antenna on their roof.
• Mark and Drew would provide the equipment and new DSL line.
• The NPPL would recognize the companies on its website and in the building with a sign.

I ran the details past the City Manager, Library Board, and Library Friends (who currently own the library building). Everyone was enthused and on board. The City Manager informed me that the North Plains City Council listed providing wifi downtown as a goal for 2008. Score for the library. The Rogue Pub has agreed to let us put a device on top of their building. Zero red tape, no hassles, easy as pie.

When users log on to the network named “North Plains Public Library” they will be directed to a page thanking them for using the network (that is, reminding them again that it is provided by the library), thanking the sponsors, and listing relevant library resources and news. I’ll likely use Feed2JS to bring in our website’s main feed (and maybe a NPPL new items feed if I can sort that out).

After plenty of doom and gloom about municipal wifi, the subject is enjoying a small resurgence. I think this is possibly the best library project with which I’ve been involved. It is providing a great service to the community, and is a great example of a library being a tech leader. The NPPL is remaining relevant. I’ve already been interviewed by the Oregonian about this and I think the Hillsboro Argus will run a piece too. This is good marketing for the library, and libraries in general.

There’s another exciting possibility. If the network has plenty of active users or the library finds additional funding for more Meraki devices, we’ll consider making inroads into the residential sections of North Plains, spreading the reach of the library even further. There are areas of North Plains that are broadband challenged so this could really solve a problem.

Thanks to all involved for making this happen!

It will be no surprise to most of you that I’m all for using WordPress to power library websites. The list of reasons to use it is long, but there’s one thing of which I’m not too terribly fond. The URLs. I dislike when URLs/look/like/this/and/contain a bunch of words and slashes, and WordPress URLs can get to be that way.

Let me say straightaway that WordPress URLs can easily be changed from something ugly and useless like:

http://example.com/?p=130

to something pretty like:

http://www.example.com/130.

That’s what I use on this site just because I’m picky and I like how clean it looks. WordPress URLs can move beyond just being not ugly to being useful and informative. Something like:

http://www.example.com/about.

Great! Moving beyond post numbers and putting content in the URLs is good for spiders indexing sites, right? This even prettier permalink arrangement uses WordPress page titles as URLs. It isn’t difficult to accomplish. Here’s the page in the WordPress Codex on Using Permalinks.

What’s not to like then? Even though they’re pretty, WordPress URLs can get long when pages are nested under other parent pages, especially if the page titles are more than one word. It would be possible to not have any nested pages, but it is useful for the sake of organization. I also do it so only main pages appear on the header of my library’s site.

The URL for the Loan Periods page on the NPPL site isn’t too long:

http://nplibrary.org/about/loan-periods/

but the URL to our Click-A-Story page is way too long. How are we supposed to advertise the program with a URL like this?

http://www.nplibrary.org/kids-and-teens/click-a-story

Yikes! That’s way too unwieldy to put on promotional material.

fun with 301 redirects

To use 301 redirects it is necessary to edit a special file called .htaccess. It is a little tricky making and or finding your .htaccess file, but the Codex has a great section called Where’s my .htaccess file?

My redirects are probably not 100% well formed, but they work. Here’s how I changed the long Click-A-Story URL into http://www.nplibrary.org/clickastory.

Redirect 301 /clickastory http://nplibrary.org/kids-and-teens/click-a-story

It’ll also work wonders for our wireless network adverts. http://nplibrary.org/about/wifi-at-the-nppl changes to http://www.nplibrary.org/wifi.

Redirect 301 /wifi http://nplibrary.org/about/wifi-at-the-nppl

To promote patron access to their accounts we can advertise http://www.nplibrary.org/account instead of using the long Polaris URL.

Redirect 301 /account http://www.wccls.org/polaris/patronaccount/default.
aspx?ctx=1.1033.0.0.1

While our library cooperative did a nice job making the URL http://www.wccls.org/search to lead to a search page, http://www.nplibrary.org/find will take users what I’ve found to be a more reliable search page.

Redirect 301 /find http://www.wccls.org/polaris/Search/default.
aspx?ctx=1.1033.0.0.1

Using these redirects to create URLs that are easy to print, remember and use is the best of both worlds. The real URLs contain good descriptive content for search engine spiders, and patrons have easy URLs. Hurrah.

what’s missing

I’d like to get a bit more fancy and use mod_rewrite for these redirects. mod_rewrite is an Apache server module that can manipulte and rewrite URLs. I tried to use it before and had a bit of success, but I’m not ashamed to say it isn’t easy. Even its own documentation calls it voodoo. With mod_rewrite, I’m pretty sure it would be possible to not only redirect from user-friendly URLs, but also display them in the address bar. If anyone wants to tutor me I’m all ears.

One more thing. Using redirects isn’t just for WordPress. I’m sure there are plenty of library URLs that could use simplifying and redirects also might come in handy when doing website redesigns. When you need to change the structure of your URLs that are already indexed, and in your users’ bookmarks, you can do so without fear of losing rank or causing 404s.

Happy redirecting!