As I mentioned earlier, I will be presenting at the Colorado Association of Libraries conference on Saturday, along with my colleagues Gwen Gregory and Robin Satterwhite.

Our talk is called Teach an Old Blog New Tricks and is designed to encourage librarians to go beyond thinking of blogs as links-plus-commentary or online journals, and think of blogs instead as content management systems. I also highlight cool and useful add-ons for blogs from third parties like Flickr, FeedBurner, and Technorati. I try to be agnostic as to the blog platform or kind of library.

To demonstrate that blogs can be used in many different ways, I used Movable Type to create a hybrid blog/slideshow for the presentation. The idea is that it can function like a blog with individual entries, comments, trackbacks, etc., but when we are presenting, we can use a javascript style-switcher (nicked from A List Apart) to go into “presentation” mode which blows the font-size up good and big, hides the sidebar, comments form, and even some text that I have marked as “notes,” thus giving us a nice clean presentation that should be legible from the back row.

I invite you all to take a look at this presentation, and let me know what you think, either via a comment here, or on the presentation blog.

I also set up the files and template tags on the blog to make it relatively easy for me to download the presentation, do two or three find-and-replaces in TextWrangler to create relative links, and end up with a presentation I can use offline if the promised internet connection at CAL goes bad.

The content of the blog is released under a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – ShareAlike license, and I had intended to do the same for the MT templates. But, although I think the templates and stylesheets will work fine on Saturday, I don’t think I’m ready to .zip them up and unleash them on the world. I also don’t know if I can include the javascript from A List Apart in a CC-licensed MT template. But if this kind of thing interests you, just contact me and I’ll be happy to share what I have done.

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