I wish I had the book MediaWiki Skins Design when I first set out to design a MediaWiki skin for my philosophy subsite. It would have saved me so much time and trouble. Those were the days when I didn’t have a baby. I could stay up half the night going through hours of CSS trial and error just to tweak one or two little design elements. I could never do that now. As soon as I have time I intend to use some of the info in this book to clean up my skins. Nothing like this existed to my knowledge when I set out to make my skins. Documentation is often the weakest link in the open source community. This book fills an important gap that should democratize MediaWiki even more, making it more appealing to a wider swath of the web population. continue reading »

Yesterday, while googling wikis, I found what looks like a fun and interesting wiki about feminist science fiction. It looks like it could use more contributors, but it has some interesting entries and links, like this one to an article about online female fanfiction written in Tolkien fanfiction communities on Yahoo. I learned that most online fanfiction is written by women. I also learned of the existence of “Legomances” (stories fantasizing about the author and Legolas) There’s more going on with Legolas than simple romance, thought. It’s not uncommon for fanfiction authors to look at Legolas as a Muse or at the race of elves in general as Muses.

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Books (etc) We Like has a blog widget for books. This one differs from the LibraryThing blog widget in being a list of recommended books, not a list of every book in your library. Every book purchased through Books (etc) We Like contributes donations to support a list of independent/alternative media organizations. You can still buy books from Amazon, Abe Books, Booksense, Powell’s or other participating etailers; you just start your purchases at Books (etc) We Like.

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GAM3R 7H30RY, a draft by McKenzie Wark, is another book that is being shared online before finishing and publishing it. Wark hopes to use the GAM3R 7H30RY website to foster discussion around two questions:

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Without Gods is an interesting experiment in going from blog to book. Without Gods is currently a blog by Mitchell Stephens, who is writing a book on the history of atheism. He is making his writing process transparent and interactive online on his blog. The end result will be a book that will be published by Caroll and Graf. His blog has attracted a good bit of discussion and debate.

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The Orientalist is out in paperback now. It looks intriguing, a literary and historical detective story. A Time review says that it “reads like a secret history of the 20th century”. It’s the true story of a Jew, Lev Nussimbaum, who assumed the persona of a Muslim prince in Nazi Germany. I think I’m going to have to read it.

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Last night, I started reading Stephen King’s new novel, Cell. I like the premise. People who use cell phones are often annoying. I read that the reason why they’re annoying is that their conversations are harder to tune out as background noise. Apparently, we can more easily tune out conversations in our environments if we hear all the participants in them. If we hear only one end of a conversation, our brain pays more attention, since it’s trying to make meaning from the fragments. I don’t yet own a cell phone. My mother tells me that cops get testicular cancer at a much higher rate than the average, due to their cell phones being so close to their bodies so much of the time. Another reason not to like cell phones is that cell phone towers are among the top five killers of endangered and threatened species of bird.

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After writing the post about RSS, Libraries and Good Reading Lists, I was starting to wonder what kind of technology might exist out there to allow me to have my own reading list feed on my own blog. Then last night, I just learned of a personal book collection cataloging site called LibraryThing. It allows you to tag your books, like you can tag your Del.icio.us bookmarks. You can share your catalog or keep it private. You can even make a blog widget that displays your reading list and book reviews on your own blog. Last night, I started adding my books. I’ve added 89 so far. What a good idea. It does for books what Del.icio.us does for websites. I’m also impressed by the one-step sign-up/sign-in feature. That’s the very first time that I can recall that I’ve signed up for any online service or community membership so easily.

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Mark Bernstein had an interesting point to make about RSS and libraries. “RSS is primarily a method for spreading the word about changes, sharing new developments among people who want to be notified,” he wrote. “This seems at cross purposes to the needs of libraries, since libraries collect and preserve. Libraries want, above all, a stable literature; RSS wants to tell you the news and then vanish.” He goes on to note that libraries need RSS, because they need news about the world of writing. This brings him to the value of reading lists, such as those bloggers could feature on their blogs. He has an example of a reading list on his own blog. I like the idea. I think bloggers’ reading lists could easily be aggregated and weighted in a way similar to Technorati’s tag cloud. Librarians could use this kind of reading list index as a way to, as he says, go beyond reinforcing best-sellers.