Nebraska Libraries on the Web

As requested, you can now get the posts on this blog delivered to you via e-mail. Just fill in the “Subscribe to Blog via Email” field in the sidebar and click “Subscribe.”

If you’d like to add this feature to your library’s site, check out the How to allow patrons to subscribe to your blog via e-mail video.

We’re doing some end of the year clean-up in the back end of the Nebraska Libraries on the Web project and it looks like you can help us out with one small item.

If you log into your site’s dashboard and select Settings from the menu, you’ll find that the third setting on this page is “E-mail Address.” This field should contain the official contact address for your library‘s Web site. (This is generally the library director or Web site admin.) Some of you will notice that instead it contains my e-mail address. (Don’t worry, you didn’t put it there, it happened as part of the site setup process on this end.)

If you see my e-mail address, please take a moment to change this to a more appropriate e-mail address and click the blue “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page. That address will shortly thereafter receive an e-mail asking to confirm the change. Please follow those instructions.

Please attend to this ASAP. In a few week’s we’ll check back and if this change hasn’t been made we’ll make it on this end using our best guess as to the appropriate e-mail address.

I’ve just finished the update to WordPress 3.8. If you haven’t logged into your dashboard already, you’ll immediate notice the design changes once you do. However, don’t worry, everything pretty much works the same way, but the icons have changed a little bit. If you have any questions about the changes just post them in the comments.

If your library uses Pinterest, you now have three new widgets available for including your Pinterest content in your site’s sidebar.

• Pinterest Board Widget
  Show up to 30 of your favorite board’s latest pins.
• Pinterest Pin Widget
  Embed one of your pins on your site.
• Pinterest Profile Widget
  Show up to 30 of your latest pins on your site.

You can find all three of them under Appearance|Widgets.

This morning we upgraded to version 3.7 of WordPress. You shouldn’t notice many changes, if any, but if you encounter any new problems please report them ASAP. Those interested in more information about this update can read this WordPress blog post.

When you log into your Dashboard you should see a new banner across the top announcing that I’ve installed and turned on WordPress Jetpack for everyone. You’re welcome to just close this by clicking the X in that banner but Jetpack does offer a few additional features that I highly recommend.

• WordPress.com Stats
  Those of you using Google Analytics to track your site’s statistics can continue to use it but with recent changes, Google Analytics will no longer work for our sites. This package gives you sits stats using WordPress.com instead of Google
• Publicize
  Turning on this feature allows you to write posts for your blog and then have them automatically posted to your library’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and/or Path accounts. Write once, publish many.
• Subscriptions
  This feature allows your readers to subscribe to your blog via e-mail if that’s their preferred method of receiving your content.

All of these features, and more, can be found under the new Jetpack item in the dashboard menu on the left.

To get started, go into Jetpack and click on the Connect to WordPress.com button. There create a WordPress.com account if you don’t already have one (chances are you don’t as this is not the same as having your site with us,) and then give Jetpack your WordPress.com login information. Once you’ve done that additional “configure” buttons will appear in the box for each Jetpack feature.

To use a particular Jetpack feature, click its configure button, and follow the provided instructions.

Over the next few weeks I’ll strive to create training videos on at least the three previously-mentioned features and post them on the Online Training page. In the meantime, feel free to post questions and comments about Jetpack on this post.

A while back I encouraged everyone to stop using the Google Weather widget and provided instructions on how to use the Weather Underground widget instead. I left the Google widget in place to give everyone enough time to convert. Today I finally removed the Google widget from the system. If this is causing problems for your site, please refer to the previously linked-to article on how to fix the problem.

I’ve just upgraded our WordPress install to version 3.6, codenamed “Oscar”. There’s not a lot of differences but you might notice a few more icons here and there. For those interested here’s the official video promoting this new version.

We’ve just finished the previously mentioned clean-up of our WordPress installation. We’ve removed all unused themes, and ran updates on all the remaining themes and all plugins. If you notice any problems or differences with your site please contact me ASAP (michael.sauers@nebraska.gov) and we’ll get on solving the problem.

I have just upgraded all of the libraries.ne.gov sites to WordPress version 3.5. In most cases you will not notice any significant changes. The one place you will see a change is in uploading new media content (photos mostly) via the “Add Media” button just above the editing window for posts and pages. Hopefully the changes will be self explanatory but I will still be working on updating the relevant training video for the benefit of libraries that join from this point forward. If you have any questions about any changes you discover please leave them here in the comments.