It's nice to be read.

Someone bothered to post about AmbientLibrarian on LISNews!

That's exciting. Glad I had that site on the wiki already.

Who can I tell?

Everyone!

I've been bouncing around for the last half hour, asking "who can I tell, who can I tell?" Then I realized, I can tell everyone who reads my blog! So, now all two of you will know ;)

Jenny Levine, of The Shifted Librarian, registered as user on AmbientLibrarian.org! I have been so amazed at the number of visitors the wiki has had since I posted it to the Web4Lib discussion list. Several contributors have added content, but others have corrected typos or spelling. It's...it's such a warm feeling, to see that people will take the time to collaborate, to make something just a little bit better.

meta tags and MediaWiki

Ok, it can't just be me.

I am having the hardest time figuring out how to add meta tags to my wiki pages. I want to add some descriptors that might help some search engines, but, alas, I can't figure out *where* to put the tags. I don't mean I can't figure out where to put it in the code--I can't find the code. It has something to do with the fact that it's all in PHP, and there's a big database at work...I just found a wiki entry on WikiMedia about making an RDF interface for MediaWiki sites...At this point, that just sounds magical, and I've read enough about metadata to know that such a framework would be a good thing...but I think that is so far beyond me right now!

Ugh. I'm just going to go back to my little w3schools tutorial on web search engines and submit my URL to a few more sites.

Google is not the devil.

Google has webmaster tools to help me make AmbientLibrarian findable!

Here is the most exciting message I've seen all day:

You've successfully verified http://www.ambientlibrarian.org/.
Pages from your site are included in Google's index.

I've just "discovered" Google Webmaster Tools. I was able to add my wiki URL at http://www.google.com/addurl/, and followed links from there to add my site to Google's indexing.

So, now, if someone searches for "ambientlibrarian," my page ranks first! Unfortunately, if someone tries it as two words ("ambient librarian"), my wiki doesn't show up. And, if someone actually searched for something useful, like "library 2.0 wiki," it's still no where to be found. But, I'm getting there.

Favicon

I did it! I added a little favicon to my wiki page! It may seem like such a small thing--and it is. Still, it wasn't easy for me.

First, I used http://www.chami.com/html-kit/services/favicon/ to create my favicon--in this case, a tiny little version of my AmbientLibrarian.org logo. Then, I had to download favicon package to my computer. The favicon instructions then implied that I could just upload the resulting favicon.ico to my file where my web page is, but I found that I had to unzip the file first.

The instructions then said to insert an html tag,
< rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico">, into the header section of my web page.

If my web page were a simple html document, I would have had no trouble. However, my web site is a wiki, and the file structure on the server seems immense to me. I'm hesitant to change too much, because I don't want to ruin everything. At first, I uploaded the favicon to the same file where my logo is--that made sense to me. Then I found an index.html document in a completely different folder. From my past experience with making a web page, I thought this might be where the tag would go, but after inspecting it, I realized this was a generic page from my hosting company--sort of a place holder file until I had my real page up.

I found another index file, but it was a PHP document. This makes sense, because MediaWiki is written in PHP. Still, that made me even more nervous about messing with anything.

I decided to give it a try, and added the html link. I tested it, and nothing happened...but, nothing happening is better than my whole wiki disappearing :) I started thinking about my past experience with uploading images for a web page, and I thought maybe the favicon file should be in the same folder as the index file...so, I uploaded it again, this time to the same folder as my index.php file...and, viola! I have an itsy-bitsy, teeny-tiny logo next to my AmbientLibrarian.org URL, that also appears next to the title of the page in book mark lists. Awesome.

Now, I'm trying to figure out how to add some meta tags to increase findability. I can add them into the index.php file, but I don't know if that will make a difference...