Kimberly Hirsh logo Kimberly Hirsh

A white woman with dark hair and glasses stands in front of a wall with several words in 3d on it. The word 'BOOK' is centered over her head.
Kimberly Hirsh in front of the wall of words at
Planet Word Museum in Washington, DC

Hi there! I'm Kimberly Hirsh. My pronouns are she/ her/hers. I'm somebody's mom. I work as a school librarian. I have a PhD in information and library science. I love to read, play tabletop and video games, and make things. I used to perform in theater and improv comedy and I may one day again. I have been extremely online since 1993 and still enjoy tinkering on the web. I manage multiple chronic illnesses. I'm married to my kid's dad. We have a cat.

Want to get in touch? You can reach me by email.

Recent posts

Chorus member from #JesusChristSuperstarLive is a legit Halloween costume choice, right?

Me, to the toddler at lullaby time: And now, something seasonal. sings “Gethsemane” @tceles_B_hsup: I thought you were gonna go with “Everything’s Alright” Me: Hi I’m Kimberly.

Finally giving The Future of Library Services for and with Teens the close read it deserves & feeling energized.

Current success metric: did I do literally any work today, at all?

Today my kid got giddy over the fact that “boot” and “book” begin the same way. Is wordplay a hallmark of the preoperational stage? #piagetftw

Dear IndieWeb, it may be time to start considering the user, not just the technical spec.

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.