So I just spent the last three days learning about XQuery for work. Five years ago I took a 4 day course in PHP programming and I was the both the youngest in the session and the only female - the same is true five years later for the XQuery training! Where are all the girls?? What are you all up to?

Anyway, my brain is so full of school and home stuff that I’m not sure I got the hang of things - but XQuery seems awesome and I can’t wait until I have time to sit down and read through the books I have and start creating awesome apps for accessing our digital collections. Keep an eye out as I learn XQuery - I’ll be sure to share tidbits with you all.

I am considering using Feed2JS on our intranet (after listening to Meredith & Paul at Internet Librarian) - I’m still going to give it a whirl, but I’ll be more cautious before I use it on any of our sites outside of the firewall after reading this warning from RSS4Lib.

If you run your own copy of Feed2JS on your own server (rather than using Feed2JS’s public version), unscrupulous folks can borrow your script — and your bandwidth — to repurpose other RSS feeds from other sites without your knowledge or permission.

There is hope though.

Feed2JS.org offers directions for restricting Feed2JS to the feeds you want to be reused.

That’s right I can admit I don’t know everything there is to know about HTML.

That doesn’t stop me from being a little ashamed to admit that I just read about 5 HTML elements I hadn’t used (or heard of) before on the SEOmoz Blog.

My favorites? <acronym> & <optgroup> - I have to go find a use for those right now!!

I mentioned that I was writing another article last week. Well I finished it and sent it in - I don’t know yet if it will be published, but I thought I’d share some of the ideas with you all.

I decided to take 2 routes. Route 1 was deciding to get someone in house to handle your library programming projects (versus a contractor) and Route 2 was how to actually handle the project once it has been offered to you. I am working on a HUGE application (as I mentioned before) at work and what better time to explain the process to others?

I went over some of the benefits of having someone in house - like the fact that they’re always there. I constantly have people stopping by my desk to ask me questions, ask for upgrades, explain what they meant, etc. This helps me with my programming and I think it helps the staff (the users) feel better about the project as a whole. With a contractor you usually only see them once in a while. We had one that only came in one a month to talk to us - and even then not everyone had time to talk with him. Most recently we had a contractor who we have never met. All communications were over the phone and only 2 or 3 people participated in those conversations even though 20 or so of the staff would have to use the application.

Why did we have contractors? Well the first one was before I learned PHP and the second one was there because our IT team (me included) could not figure out how to achieve the result we were looking for. So, even if you have a programmer in house, you may still have to hire and outside consultant, but it will be less frequently (I hope).

I talked about planning the project - meetings, flow charts, more meetings. Which is interesting because I’m reading The Accidental Library Manager right now and Rachel suggests that you have as few meetings as possible and keep the on point and on schedule. I agree with her 100% - but it just never seems to happen that way when you’re talking about changing the way people have worked for 5 or more years. Plus, you as a programmer have no idea how people have been working for the last 5 years, so you have to spend time sitting with them and listening to them until you understand what goal they need to reach - the staff of your library is now your user - I repeat that a lot.

Well I hope you all get to read the entire article, I included some stuff here that I didn’t get to fit in - so you got a sneak peak and the bonus features.

First, let me say - I love Lifehacker - I just wish it wasn’t so hard to keep up with - I’m out of commission for 2 days and I have 95 new things to read about

Now what I’m really writing about.

View Rendered Source Chart is a Firefox plugin that lets your view the souce code of a page with the nesting in pretty colored boxes. Now if I could have a plugin for HTML-Kit that could do that same thing I’d be in heaven!