Steve Ely

Ely 2.0

Depending on your timing, you may be encountering an awkward lack of content. Today I replaced the static HTML pages I had at this address (steveely.net) with this installation of WordPress. Hopefully all the content from those two pages will be back up on some convenient new pages before the weekend’s over.

Those two pages, though, were certainly the low end of what I could be doing with this domain. For almost a year now, this site has offered only my profile–essentially an edited HTML resume, along with the PDF original–and a second page with some relevant links. While each of those are important for my principal presence on the web, it only makes sense to get in the habit of blogging here and perhaps posting some longer writings and other projects as well.

For a few years I’ve used Blogger intermittently, and then last year I posted semi-regularly for a grad school student group I led on a WordPress blog installed and maintained by a colleague on her own site. When she completed her MLIS degree and moved on, I tried migrating the whole thing to the school’s servers. It seemed to work briefly, but our new webmaster and I soon found that mysterious environmental factors seemed to conspire against us. We gave up on the effort to host the blog on the university’s domain, and I put everything into a TypePad blog hosted by the national organization. I believe they’re still using that at this time. My point is that I have some experience with blogging generally, with blogging in WordPress, and even a little with administering WordPress; I do need, though, to expand and build upon that. Any returning visitors to this site are therefore likely to find the appearance evolving along with the content.

I’m obviously not only blogging here to develop my WordPress skills, though. While there are a great many subjects I’ll leave for other platforms, I do plan to discuss here matters relating in any way to library and information science. I often prefer “librarianship,” actually, but neither that nor even “library science” gives you quite as nice an acronym as LIS. Moreover, “library and information science” nicely connects the work in traditional libraries with the organization, retrieval, and use of information in other contexts. I’m a big fan of del.icio.us and of David Weinberger’s work, so I’ll certainly be exploring topics in that vein, as well as other LIS topics. And I’ll likely mention elements of my own life from time to time as well.

I hope you find it all as worthwhile as I do.