Building a Catalog!

I got approval to build the catalog for a small non-profit! Yay! The web developer for the non-profit gave me a subdomain to do all my fun, which means that I can install plugins to my heart's content and explore what is best.

I'm building out a few other pages, such as bibliographies and galleries of their content. Which meant that I needed access to the backend of their main domain to discover their content because the website is an organizational mess.

I'm using WordPress and the Web Librarian plugin for catalog creation. I'm using WorldCat for the bibliographical information of text items. After I've imported a lot of records, I need to see what the search capabilities are and whether there is an ability to create a thesaurus. At the moment, I'm not sure there is- certainly a list of keywords/subject in alphabetical order, but a thesaurus with relationships, which is key to discovery, that's what I think is missing within the features and so the question will be whether I can create something.

Maybe create a form using custom post types of:

Keyword
definition
RT
NT
BT

and then somehow tie them to the catalog entry form...

But YAY! having fun, fun, fun!

Using Maps to Convey Information

I contract with an excursion company that does not have a physical address; Instead, we have a mobile office. But for one of our excursions we do consistently meet in the same spot, however, my boss tells me that guests are always confused by it, so, she asked me to create a map.

I read this great article on one illustrator's map designing process. Then I searched through quite a few tutorials (ex. http://inkscapetutorials.org/?s=pen) and youtube videos on the open source alternative to Adobe Illustrator. I also got to learn about the open source map data provider Open Street Map. All in all this was a fun, simple project to learn how to use the software and build a map that will hopefully help clear our guests doubts about where to go for their tour.

I'm still awaiting approval, we'll perhaps change some of the colors and text, but this is the general idea.

On Making an Infographic

You never know where inspiration will strike. I wanted to make a sign to alert people about the things they could recycle in the town where I live in Puerto Rico and at first I was just going to make a list. Then I had two thoughts, writing the same information in two languages is tedious; and, what if the person "reading" the sign doesn't read English/Spanish anyway? (We have visitors from all over the world.)

So I decided to make a sign using pictures. Over five hours later and with the input of a few people, I got this:

This is with "borrowing" images from the internet. Imagine if I'd had to create the icons from scratch. I'm not a designer and I'm not planning on selling this- just wanted to make a neat and attractive graphic that I could print on a label and slap on a bin.

I used the GIMP software (open source Photoshop alternative) to create the image file. The project file has 14 layers. Upon reflection, I should have probably made it in Scribus (open source InDesign alternative.) Oh well. I still have the original project file, so I could import the individual images should the desire strike me.

I consulted several YouTube videos and the online GIMP documentation to do all sorts of things like creating diagonal lines, making vertical text and using keyboard shortcuts. Personally, I think the rinse to avoid bugs instructions is fairly genius.

Six Degrees of Separation for Wikipedia Articles

Doing some research on the Wikimedia Foundation and I came across this really rad project called wikiGraph that a student of the Hackbright Academy created to visually demonstrate how a person can go from one subject to another, totally seemingly unrelated, subject. Not as unrelated after all.

The about page has links to a detailed discussion of the tech behind the magic. I have some learning to do! But this is kinda like a reading map for encyclopedia articles, though not curated.

Note: this mashup uses structured information from Wikipedia extracted by the DBpedia community.