I use this blog as my home on the web, so in addition to traditional blog posts, you’ll find here all the types of things you might find on social media. I know that can be overwhelming, so feel free to only look at long posts, short notes, shared links, photos, social media interactions, or what I’m reading/listening to/watching/playing.

Austin Kleon’s meditations on retail spaces for community building and creativity have me thinking about how libraries can learn from these experiences to create spaces that meet patrons’ needs.

I watched the first eight minutes or so of this and got major X-Files/BtVS vibes and I’m into it.

Hey spring!

Eli Mellen makes some excellent points here. I’ve been slowly chipping away at going full Indieweb for about a year. Only this weekend did I really get all the way there, and it took a lot of advice from Chris Aldrich, some assistance from David Shanske in the IndieWeb chat, and the judicious use of Chrome developer tools (especially the web inspector) and Google to get to where I am today, which is pretty much where I want to be.

I have WordPress and I installed all the appropriate plug-ins. I followed all of the directions in the Getting Started with WordPress parts of the Wiki. But these were the pieces that were missing that only recently did I get together:

• Sharing links in a POSSE way and having them actually look good
• Posting notes to Facebook and Twitter without weird link previews or my Gravatar popping up
• Sharing on mobile

I wouldn’t ask your average social media user to do all the things I had to do to make this happen. As Eli says,

...the IndieWeb is at an exciting inflection point.

I’m immensely grateful for all the help I’ve received getting started, but I do hope that over time people won’t have to be as dev-headed as me to jump in. I am a far cry from any sort of developer, but I do have a lot more knowledge of how the web works than I think most people do. If it was tricky and took me a year to get it to do what I wanted, I can’t imagine what a challenge it will be for them.

Moroccan Sea Salt Spray - Me, spraying this on my unwashed hair: my hair isn’t dirty! It’s BEACHY! #mermaidlife #seawitchvibes

Here’s a quick write-up of the stages I go through when working on an episode of my podcast.

1. Prep. This includes scheduling guests, watching the episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that we’re going to talk about and taking notes, analyzing my notes for themes, listening to other BtVS podcasts to see if they bring up anything new that I want to be sure to talk about, and doing some basic research on things like who wrote and directed the episode. [Tools: email, calendar, TV, Hulu, pen and paper, podcast app]

2. Recording. This is when I sit down and actually record with my guests. I bring in my notes, but it’s pretty freewheeling. [Tools: Audacity, microphone, earbuds.]

3. Editing. I go back and listen to the recording. I cut out basic stuff like “ums” and “ahs,” but also big tangents that don’t really tie into the episode discussion much. [Tools: Audacity, earbuds]

4. Processing. I clean up the sound during this stage. [Tools: Audacity, earbuds]

5. Finalizing. I add the intro and outro music and compress the whole thing into a tidy little MP3. [Tools: Audacity, earbuds]

6. Writing up show notes. I listen one more time and make a note of anything I want to be sure to link to when the episode goes up. [Tools: Audacity, earbuds, notepad app]

Again, I’m not actually releasing the show yet, so I don’t have any information yet on that part of the process. When I do, I’ll try to document the process of releasing and marketing episodes.