Our site in Spanish

I would like to have a link so people can read the website in spanish. Babble Fish and Google both translate pages into spanish but the translations aren’t the same. I guess that’s no surprise. You would think the word home would be the same in both but they even use different words for home. Since I don’t speak spanish I can’t tell which is more accurate. Here’s the site En Espanol as translated by BabbleFish. The Google version messes up the navigation bar but that maybe could be fixed. The main thing is which is a better translation? Does anyone on staff speak spanish?

More on Tags

I tried creating a tag cloud for the blog but am not very pleased with the results.  For one thing we just don’t have enough tags at this point to make a very interesting looking cloud.  The other thing is — well, I’m just not that excited by tags clouds.  I think they’re generally pretty ugly.  

Wordle is kind of interesting so this might be something to play around with later.   Wordle lets you jazz up the tags with colors but since they aren’t clickable I’m not sure what the point is.   Rapid City’s tag cloud demonstrates one other thing that bothers me and that is tags want to be a single word.  if you have a phrase like reader’s advisory it wants to run the words together: readersadvisory.   If you have a lot of these it can be hard to read.  They seem to get around the issue by using the underscore a lot.

You can see how Live Oak Public Library is using tags for navigation.   At least one of their branches: Oglethorpe Mall is a tag they use.  Instead of doing it this way I have each library listed as a subcategory in the sidebar so when you click the name of the library all the articles appear on one page.

RSS feeds

I set up two feeds for the site, one is for people to subscribe to our podcasts and the other is just a general feed of all the blog entries which have been posted.   RSS feeds let our patrons subscribe to our frequently updated information, such as all of our blog posts or podcasts.   To receive the feeds patrons would download a Feed Reader to read our feeds subscriptions.   RSS is an acronymn for “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary” depending upon who you talk to.    The article Rich Site Services: Web Feeds for Extended Information and Library Services  provides an overview and some links to how some libraries use RSS.