 Good morning, and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series. We cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show as we are doing today, and that is posted on our website in our archives for you to watch at your convenience. And I'll show you at the end of today's show, where you can access all of our archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. For those of you not from Nebraska, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries that would be similar to yours, so-and-so state library. So we provide services and training and consulting to all types of libraries in Nebraska. So you will find topics on our shows, on a show for all types of libraries. Public K-12 academic corrections, museums, archives. Basically, it just runs the gamut. Our only real criteria is it is something to do with libraries, something libraries are doing, some resources or services we think might be useful to them. We do book reviews, interviews, do little mini training sessions. Could be anything and everything. We do bring in guest speakers from across Nebraska and across the country, actually, sometimes on the show. And sometimes we have Nebraska Library Commission staff present with us. And this morning, that's what we have today. Today is the last Wednesday of the month, which means it is pretty sweet tech day. Yay! Amanda Sweet is our Technology Innovation Librarian here at the Nebraska Library Commission. And the last Wednesday of every month, she comes on and does a pretty sweet tech session for us. So if you are the techie type person or into that kind of thing at your library, this would be the show definitely for you to register for and come and see. We do techie things other times during the month, too. Sometimes it depends on what we have, but always last Wednesday of the month, you can guarantee 99% of the time, and Amanda will be here with us. And today she's going to talk about our Nebraska Libraries on the Web Project that we have here at the Nebraska Library Commission that helps our libraries get websites up and running. So I will hand it over to you, Amanda, to tell us all about our program. So Nebraska Libraries on the Web, here's what we'll kind of go over just to give an idea. I'll just do a quick blurb about what Nebraska Libraries on the Web is, how it got started, how you can get started in the program if you're not already in it, and how you can start updating your website if you haven't touched it in a little bit. And then I'll go over some major WordPress updates that happened relatively recently. So and I'll also go over some of the plugins that people have gotten a lot of use out of and that have been added somewhat recently. And then you'll be able to start navigating the installation through the Nebraska Libraries on the Web. If you're outside of Nebraska, you can also start the plugins that I use are free so you can download them on your own installation and start using them if you'd like. All right, so Nebraska Libraries on the Web will basically just let you set up a WordPress website for free, and it is going to be maintained by the Nebraska Library Commission. So we have all the servers here. We maintain the files and we if anything goes horribly, horrifically wrong, we're in fixes it. So good times are had by all. And it was the program was started by Michael Sowers. But I didn't remember what year. Do you remember around what year he started that? That would be a good question. I could probably find out. Yeah, Michael is Amanda's predecessor, Technology Innovation Librarian years ago here at the Commission. But I do not remember off the top of my head how long ago it was. I used to know that. But I want to say it was like 2011 or something like that. But I could be wrong. But so the good thing about this is that kind of the hard stuff and the back end stuff is maintained at the Library Commission. And if you run into any troubleshooting issues, if it's WordPress related, I can usually help with it. If it is server related, Vern or someone else from the comp team helps with it. And libraries, the only thing they actually have to do is update the content. So add in images, change out the layout and keep your content fresh. So it kind of makes the role of the library easier for setting up the website. And it is all run through WordPress, which is kind of it's way easier than hand coding everything. You don't have to touch a line of code. And it's basically a drag and drop system that lets you set up your website. So in order to get started with WordPress, all it takes a little bit of time. You just need to brainstorm what you actually want to put on your website. So the pages that show up on there and then start gathering up your images and what you want to show up on the website. You can either use your... You can use pictures that you've taken of library events or pictures that you've taken of the library or the community. If you don't have a ton of those already or if they're kind of out of date, you can also go to websites like Pixabay and you can download images and use and load them into WordPress from there. And websites like Pixabay, they're actually free to use. They are free images and royalty free images that you can use at will. You just want to double check the copyright on there that it is free for commercial use and you can put it on there. If it is free for educational use, you can put it on, but you usually have to put a little blurb in there showing the source of the image. And that's just general copyright. And then you would just want to write some content out. A lot of times I recommend just opening up a Google Doc or a Microsoft Word document. Write out the actual words you want to appear on the page. And then you can have that as your reference point as you're starting to lay out your different pages. And as you start getting used to the way that WordPress works, you can start writing your content shorter or longer so that it'll fit in different boxes or over different images or it'll so it'll fit in the layout that you have. And so once you have all this together, I recommend doing this first and then learning the basics of WordPress because as you learn the basics of WordPress, you may as well just put what you're actually going to put on there and then you'll be able to just copy and paste your content into WordPress itself. So brainstorm, gather your stuff and pop it in WordPress. Now I'm going to go actually into WordPress to show you some of the major updates. So this is where I'm going to Google. You can also take a look. Libraries also take a look at other libraries, websites they've done as well. Yeah, I was going to go over some of that when I went through the Gutenberg Editor and Elementor Editor because we'll look at some different websites and actually copy what they've done using. No, I mean, it's not going to be an exact copy but once you start looking at more websites, it's kind of you're basically just tetrasing together the same stuff in different ways. And so it's kind of you're not really creating anything from scratch. It's the same style of thing that you're just kind of updating, changing the colors, changing size and changing layout. And so I'm going to go into... So this is what your dashboard is going to look like if you haven't been in WordPress in a while or if you are just kind of getting restarted. But so one of the major things that has updated is I'm going to go into Pages and this All Pages here and I'll show you the two different editor styles that are available. And this is just going to take a little bit of a second to load here. It might be because I'm also using camera and for my internet just doesn't like me right now. I can see that it's thinking about it. There we go. So I'm going to add a new page just to kind of give you a layer of the land. I'll add one using the current the original WordPress Gutenberg Editor. And then I'll add another page using the Elementor plugin which is a plugin that is used for a more specialized layout. So this is the Gutenberg Editor. If you haven't used WordPress in a little while or you're trying to hop back into it, you always want to add my microphone file. You always want to add a title. So I will just call this a test and then you would add in blocks by adding in this little plus sign to add a block. And it'll give you in the different block element options that you have available. I'm going to click on browse all so that you kind of get an idea of everything that's available to you. So these are going to be sectioned off by the style of block. In this text area is going to be your any paragraphs or headings or lists. Like if you want it to look like a regular webpage that has been around since the dawn of web, then this is kind of where you would be. And then you can spice it up a little bit by adding in some different media and image galleries. So if you are trying to show off like a cake van collection or you want to show off some new books that are coming in, you can use this gallery block. So I'll click on this gallery block and then you can upload some different images in here or access images from your media library. The media library is a collection of images, PDFs and other, well, it's media that you've loaded that to be available in your website. So since I've done some examples of WordPress before, I'm just going to grab some of these different book covers that I've already got as example. And I'm going to click on create a new gallery, insert a gallery, and it will automatically format everything based on the size of the image. So I intentionally chose image sizes that are all uniform sizes. And that's so that it would line up neatly instead of being all jagged like that. And you can also, depending on the type of image you're putting in, if you are putting in one horizontal and one vertical image, you might want to change the alignment on it. So all the images are centered or all the images are aligned on the left. And that will just kind of neaten up the layout, but every time you load something in here, you can also preview it. So this will now let you preview in desktop, tablet and mobile mode. So if you want to test the responsiveness of any of your themes, WordPress built in that preview style. So I will preview it in a new tab. And when you do that, it will automatically go to your selection on top, whether it's mobile or desktop, et cetera. And it's thinking about it. There we go. So this is just what it looks like. And so this is kind of the quickest, easiest way to do an image gallery, show off an event that you may have had, do your new materials or just anything like that. And let me go into, so if you do have any smaller images that you would want it to put in here, you can also remove the sidebar on some or all pages so that it fills up the entire thing instead of getting squished into a corner. This is help removing the sidebar is helpful if you are displaying PDFs with policy pages because policy pages tend to be in a 12 point font. And when it's squished into the side, it can get too hard to read. So just fill it up on the page and you're good to go. To be able to do that in the regular Gutenberg editor, you can go into this right-hand side here. This is going to be the settings that will let you change anything in individual blocks or on the pages a whole. If you don't see this menu on the side here, it's actually in this little gear block settings. I don't remember when they actually added this but I know that it's relatively new. You can click on this gear block and that will get this menu to appear and disappear. Make sure that page is selected up here and then you can scroll clear down to the page attributes and the template. And this will let you change out from default template that includes the sidebar to the one column, no sidebar. And then we'll preview that and that should take out that sidebar. I might not do quite as many previews as I had originally planned just because that's kind of taking a second to load but we'll see how it goes. If you want to, you can not do the camera for the time while you're trying to get the page site to work. I don't know if that would help the... Worth a try. But I would say if you do it and you do less that I highly recommend previews. I do this so many previews and I'm updating our pair of things because you gotta know what it's gonna look like. And sometimes I think in the editor, oh, it looks perfect. And then I go out to the page and I was like, oh no, no, that's not right at all. Whoops. That's not what it looks like in real life. And what's funny is that it's always editable. You can always change it. Nothing is in the still, it's okay. That is true. And I would also always recommend doing the tablet and mobile version just to make sure that it looks the way you want it to. Yep, you have to. And so I'm gonna go back into the desktop version. And if you do want to make additional changes to this block itself, when you click on the block in the upper left-hand corner, it will let you transform this image over into a different block layout. So you can add a columns image if you'd wanted to mix in some different text and things like that. Or on the right-hand side, you can change the number of columns so you can customize it like that. So if you are using larger images, you might only want one in a row or you might want a couple or you can add multiple different image galleries or different blocks. So you can have like two next to each other, one filling it and then two next to each other, one filling it depending on how you like to. And you can also link this over to an actual URL or if you want people to be able to click it over and open up something, you can do it that way. And so I'm going to remove this block so I can demonstrate a different one. So whenever you want to remove a block, you can go into this three dots on the right-hand side and go to remove block. So another common thing that's been happening with the new editor is the column flexibility. So we'll go into this browse all and I'm going to go find our columns. So here is the design. So the design is going to be more flexible with the layout itself. If you grab the columns and grab the... Let's grab this one. So if you are having troubles with the sidebar, there have been instances where you can use something like this to replace your sidebar on a desktop. But the widgets are still recommended for doing the sidebar just because that's how WordPress was designed and that's going to help with the responsive design if you keep it that way. But there have been some people who have been using this style of column to replace that sidebar. So it is an option if you want to look into it. But with this column to add a new block inside that column, you just hit this plus sign on here and then you can insert in... Oh, let's say that we want a paragraph in here and you will type in and then you can hit the plus sign over here and let's say that you want a PDF on this side. I click the PDF Embedder. You can click here in... With the PDF Embedder, you click here to open the media library and then I'm hoping I actually have a PDF here. I'll grab this one. So I'll select it. So in this PDF Embedder, only the link is going to show up in the actual preview here. You have to go to the physical preview page to be able to view that PDF and what it would look like. And I don't know why WordPress set it up that way. It must just be a rendering thing. But if you click through this and say, where's my PDF? That's why it'll only show the link. So now in the actual page, this is the embedded PDF and this is my test paragraph on the column on the right. So if you'd wanted to feature some different events that are coming up or maybe a book group discussion, you might want to use a two-column layout to be able to have a cover image of the book on the left-hand side and then a description of the date, time and book title on the right-hand side. And you can also add in, instead of just paragraphs, you can start to mix it up a little bit. So you can add in headings. And so I'll add in a heading here. And so if you want this to show up above this, you can use the arrow blockings up here. So you can do this move up and now it'll shift it over to the top here. And I'm going to move this over here. And you can also do an insert before to add a new block specifically in this column. So the way that I did that was to click into this block. When you click into a block, it'll open up that menu. When you click into this more options here, when you do the insert before and insert after, it will add a block inside that column. So you can click to start typing and then hit this plus sign, add a heading. And then if you had wanted the title to be over here, instead of at the top, you can put it in there. And you can change the heading type if you had wanted it to be a H3 and you can center it. And then you can add in, and if you didn't actually want this block, you don't have to worry about it. It'll just kind of get gone if you don't do anything with it. And now we'll preview. So this is how you can kind of start to mix that up a little bit. And if you had wanted to, you could even add another image down here. So that's why this new block layout is a lot more flexible than the old editor because the old editor, you used to just have to type everything in just like a regular text editor. And then it was kind of a little bit more wonky to be able to do your layout. So let me show one other format here. And I'm going to remove the blocks that I had in here. So I'll remove, remove. So now this has turned into a one column layout after I removed that other column, but it's also still squished into that side. So I'm going to remove this, remove block, remove this, and here. So now I wanna be up here, and I'll remove that because we don't need a double title. And I'll hit this plus sign down here. And then I'll go into the browse all. And they also have the media and text option. So this media and text option is going to pre-form at it so that your media shows up on the left-hand side and you can add in a block of text without having to go through dragging over an image block and dragging over a text block. And you can also switch the order of it so that this is going on the contents on the left and the media is on the right. And you can also turn it into kind of a card style so that you're changing the alignment of it. And so this is what it would look like. Go into the media library. I'm going to stop my camera just to see if that helps a little bit. So this is just kind of makes it easier so you don't have to add in the drag over the extra blocks in that column layout. So this is basically a two-column layout but it's pre-formatted as to what goes in it. And now instead of having to remove each different block in all the columns, when you remove this one, it'll just get rid of this whole thing in mass and remove block there. So then I'll go into this plus sign here and I'll show you some other common layouts that have been added in this new WordPress. So if we go down here. So in the Nebraska libraries on the web installation, you'll also see this widget section for the layout. The widgets are going to be tied into different plugins and different options on here. So the shortcoder is tied into a plugin and the shortcoder will let you add in your own customized code and insert it into your website. And WP forms will let you add in your own customized form. So I'll click on this one because it's probably the more popular one. So WP forms and it's going to ask you to select a form. My sample one has been an event registration. So this will automatically let you embed a form and it takes like 30 seconds to embed it instead of having to do the whole mass individually. And with the WP form plugin, it will let you customize the different fields that are put in here. And if you don't already have a form made, you can go into those WP forms and go to add new and it will let you add in your new fields. And so if you are not a Nebraska library but you are looking for a good form plugin, that is a good one. I use it all the time. And it also has the capture option. So the capture option has to be customized to and formatted to each different site. But once you've set up capture once, it will be available on all the forms that you make up. And that capture will add that I'm not a robot button so that you don't get a mess of spam from your form. If you don't add that, you run the risk of having like brute force attacks or a bunch of bots that are trying to fill in this form eight million times and crash your server. So that's why we have to add that I'm not a robot button. I highly recommend it so you don't have to deal with that. Yeah, I know. All right, so let me remove this one. It was just an example. And I'll add in a new block here. Go to browse all and I will go to this slide show. So the slide show and I'll just kind of show you what it looks like here. I'll go to the media library to pull in just a few sample images. So if you are trying to show off some different events that are coming up or some different new resources you want to feature, let me just grab a few of these images here. Just as an example, I'll grab this one. Then I'll do create a new gallery and insert gallery. And then I'll go into the preview page. So this is what it would look like if you wanted to add in that featured images. My preview is not rendering the right way. Let me add in. So it will basically just look like this. It's probably my slower internet that's doing it or just something that's not letting it render the right way. Every so often with these blocks you will also run into something that won't show up in preview but when you publish it, it will actually show up. I don't know which little quirk and WordPress actually does that. But if something looks like it should show up but it doesn't go in preview, try publishing it and then see if it'll show up and publish. And you can know if it doesn't look how you want, of course. Have your delete key handy. And so with this one, you can also change the... You can make it so that people manually have to hit the button to transition between slides or you can hit this auto play so that it will automatically run through and you can change the delay that goes between different slides. So if you've added text onto some of these and you want people to have a little bit of a time to read the text, you can drag this up to about five seconds to give people some time to process through that. And you can also change the size of this image so that it doesn't take up the entire thing. But I usually just leave it as large just because I like that full width display. And you can also start adding in your own custom styling on here if you'd wanted to add like a border box or you wanted to change the color of these arrows or you wanted to start doing further customization. So this is when you start getting into the differences between this Gutenberg editor and the Elementor plugin. So the Elementor plugin will let you do more advanced layout options. So the Elementor plugin has the same slideshow but it will let you go into the blocks and automatically customize these colors. And it will also let you customize how long it takes to transition between slides. So it just the Gutenberg, this regular Gutenberg editor is great for beginners and people who don't want to mess too much with customizing every little thing. So if you just wanna be able to block and load everything and just load it in, you're good to go. Then this Gutenberg editor is a good way to go. If you're one who likes to have like the heavy customization, I will demonstrate this Elementor plugin next. So I'm going to go into pages, all pages. I'm not going to save this one because it was just a demonstration. And we're going to head into Elementor. If you don't already have Elementor, if you search for Elementor in the plugins, it will pop right up. And I'm going to add a new page. The reason that I'm not just clicking edit with Elementor from that other page we were on is because Elementor will try to convert all of those old blocks into that Elementor format. And sometimes that turns a little weird. So I try to, if I know I'm going to use Elementor, I try to do it right from the start just so that it's easier to edit and customize everything. And so when you add a new page that you're going to edit with Elementor, make sure that you change this title first. If you forget to change this title and just click directly on this edit with Elementor button, which I will do now. Elementor will generate a random string of text. So it will say Elementor, then number 84325 as your title page, which just looks a little weird on there. So just make sure you put in that title. And I will sip my coffee while this loads. So you can see that this block layout is, it'll start to look pretty similar. It uses the, your blocks that are available are on this left-hand side. And this one is separated out into, so there is a pro version of this. If you had the paid version of it, it'll let you have a lot more customization. But a lot of times I can, like I never added the pro version just because one, I really like free things. And two, nine times out of 10, what you want to do is in the free format or you can add in different CSS to make it look the way that you want. So the, you can use any of these blocks except for this little pro block in the middle. The only reason I may have ever been tempted to use the pro block is because of, let me go down here. So the Facebook integration. So Facebook has really changed their policies. So a lot of the older free plugins like the social media feed and like the Facebook like feed and anything like that, they changed their policies so that they can no longer share content with a third party site. They updated it so that the plugins that used to do that, it will send over HTML text, but it won't send over any images. And since a lot of libraries were using just regular JPEGs or just PDFs or images as their, as their, what is displayed on Facebook that kind of rendered the whole thing useless because it doesn't pass over images anymore. The only way that it passes over images is if you pay for the pro version of things. And I'm not a fan of that. I don't like the way that they have updated that, but it is what it is. So that is the only reason I would have been tempted to go to the pro version of any of those plugins or this plugin itself is because of this integration. Basically, when you pay for it, it makes your life easier to pass things over to Facebook, but I think it's just as easy to just upload it once to WordPress and once to Facebook and save your money, but it's really up to you. I'll mention now too also, if anybody has any questions, go ahead and type in your question section at any time, anything you wanna see more in detail of or anything you have confused about or anything, go ahead and let us know. All right, so I will demonstrate a lot of what we just went over in the Gutenberg editor, but I'll show the extra customization in Elementor and you can choose which one is right for you. So I'll start with this basic gallery and this is in your general section, so you know you can use it. So instead of just clicking on this one, it's going to ask you to drag and drop it. So I'm going to click on this plus sign here on the right-hand side. I'll tell it how many columns across we want the layout to be and this one will also give you more column options than the Gutenberg editor. So I'll just do, I'll start with this one across because that's going to work better with the gallery. So when you click on this plus sign, you're going to get your options back here and I'm going to search for gallery just because I already know what it's called and I'm going to drag and drop this in here. And so to choose the images in the Elementor option, you would go over into this left-hand side where it says the no images selected, hit the plus sign here and then you can grab your images and I'm just gonna grab those same book covers that I had loaded because I don't want to run through uploading new stuff right now. So I'm just going to grab a mess of these book covers just as example, create a new gallery and insert and this will also let you drag and drop things if you didn't want them to be in exactly that order. So you can kind of push stuff around like that and I'll go to insert gallery. Now your images will load in here and you can change the way that it appears. By default, it goes to that thumbnail image so that it'll chop off and make it so that it's 150 by 150 pixels in size. But if you go to this large option, then you start getting this so that it is the full size of the image. And you can also see that this image that I grabbed on the side, it must be a little bit different size. So now it's going to become more clear if you didn't grab the exact same pixel size images in that original when you originally downloaded it. But you can also customize this so that it is, yep, medium large. And I actually like it as large. So this actually takes like a little bit of playing around just to find the format that you like and then change around the different column sizes that you like. And I think we had three across in the original one in the demonstration before, so I'll keep that one. And now you can go into this style and start playing around with the extra settings in here. So if you want some spacing that goes in between these different images and instead of having them all smushed together, you can go to the spacing and customize and you can kind of change how far apart these are. And I usually like about a 15. And you can also add borders if you needed to differentiate between images a little bit more. You can add in customized captions that so if you wanted to feature different events that were going on, you can add a caption that says like community room event or economic development meeting in community room or whatever you want it to be. And you can also go into this advanced tab and you can start playing around with the margin and padding. So the margin, and it's easier if I just kind of click it and show you. So the margin you can see the white space on the outer edge of this is increasing and it's pushing the content into the center. So that margin is going to be the block on the outside. I'll reset this and the padding will look somewhat similar but it's going to, the difference is the way that it's going to affect the individual images at times. And if you had a color block that was going around the outside of this, you would see a bigger difference between margin and padding. But this is just kind of a way that you can play around with your settings to make sure that it looks the way that you want. And I'm going to go into this background option. So the background option will let you add in that color block. So if you click on the classic, it'll look like a little paintbrush and then click on this little color block and I'll change this to a blue just so it's kind of obvious what color it is. And you can see that this block has now changed. So now I'll go back into this advanced setting and we're going to head back into our padding. So this is the padding and then I'm going to reset this and this is your margin. So you can see the margin is the physical white space that goes around this entire section. So even though you have this blue background, it shrunk the blue background with it. And that's not always what you want with your section. So we'll reset this down and go back into this padding. So if you have a background, I recommend playing with the padding, but not as much with the margin because it'll start to look a little weirder. And so this is actually how they do some more of the specialized layouts and some of the content blocking. So if you go down below this gallery and add in, we'll go to the plus sign and add another single column here. And then we'll go to this plus sign here and I'm going to add a text editor. So we'll drag and drop this text editor. So now anytime you add a block in Elementor, it will automatically display the default text, which is your lorem ipsum. This is like a standard text that they use just as like a, it's like a dummy text. But if you want to change it, you can go to this left-hand side. We'll add a heading and then when you hit enter, it'll automatically let you start adding in a paragraph. So you can go into, going to fix that P in there. And if you had wanted to, you could also add in some images in here. So we'll go into Media Library. So this text editor will look sort of similar to the classic WordPress editor if you're used to using that. So I will add this little, just cause it's colorful and easy to see and shrink it down and shrink it down. So the reason that I'm shrinking this is to show you this, the alignment. And I'm going to move this up. So here, the reason this isn't actually doing exactly the way that I had wanted it to do is because there's not like a whole, a ton of text on here, but you can also shift this over so that it's aligning in with your paragraph instead of just inline and chopping through your text. But that's more apparent when you start adding in more text and you can start playing around with the visuals of that. But you can also add in a background block, a background color block to pretty much any block that's on here. So I'll go to this advanced, go to the background type, go to this paintbrush here, and then go into color. And then I'll choose the, I'm just gonna make this a really contrasting color just so that it's just for example. So this is when you would start wanna use that, using that margin and padding because you can see that this T is right next to the edge of this color block and that's not always the greatest visual. So that's when you would wanna start going into this advanced and using the padding so that it will push that text in so that it looks a little bit cleaner and start to line up with the edges here. I think I had that at 15. If you don't want this extra space on the top, you can also unlink these so that the top can be adjusted accordingly and bottom so that it's not quite so much extra space. And this is where your margin is going to come in handy. If you wanted to close the gap between these, you can unlink these and go to the top and make this a negative value. And it will shove that up next to it. So this is how you can kinda start playing around with the way these blocks look and start cleaning up your layout and start messing around with the colors. And you can see that I used some somewhat clashing colors here. I'll call this my Superman page kind of. But if you did want some more intentional colors, you may have seen this website before, but I will go to coolers.co. Howdy. And so this is a color block. So this is a color block. So this is a color block. And so this is a color palette generator. I'll click on start the generator. And so this one is activated by the space bar on your keyboard. So if you hit space bar, it will start changing out these different colors. So let's say that we wanted this English vermilion. You can hit the lock button to lock this into place, hit the space bar and then hit space bar until you get a set of colors that you actually like. So if we had wanted to keep that red and kind of bluish green color, now that we know that these colors are kind of, they're actually color palleted together. So they're designed to work together. You can hit this copy hex and then go back into WordPress, go into which one did I just copy? I think I copied that blue one. So I'll click into this block here, go into the background, click back open my color, and then I'll copy and paste it into this hex color. So now it'll shift over to that color. And then you can repeat the same process. I'll hit the copy hex with the little clipboard thing. And then I'll go back into Elementor. I've clicked on this block, go to background, go to your color, and then we'll copy and paste it into this hex key. So now it is slightly less fugly. And now since you've changed the color of this, you might also want to change the color of your text so that it's easier to read on here. So now we'll go into the style and you can change the color of your text. So style, text color, and you can make this a white. So this is one thing that you wanna pay attention to in the color palette generator. So you can see that some of these are black on top of the color and some of them are white on top of the color. This website is set up so that it automatically changes the font color, so for readability. So that's why you see that some of these are different colors. So this is one indicator to you that says that I'm using this red color. Coolers has made this white, so I wanna use white or a lighter color to make this readable. So that is why I made this a white color. So now you can see the side by side of this and this is why they didn't make this a black because it is hard to read. And then you can also change. Yeah, we'll go in here and go into content style. What I'm looking at right now is why this changed but this didn't. And so let me go in here and I'm going to check my other settings to find out which one is affecting which thing. To find out how to get this white. And because this should have actually done it just because this text color should be affecting everything but I'm gonna go into the global colors and see if I can change it across the board. No, I cannot. Let me try this again and I'm going to go into the content highlight. This go to style. That's interesting. This is either a quirk in the program or just a setting I haven't found yet. But so another way that you can get around this is by adding instead of adding these in the text editor you can add these as different blocks that are grouped together. When they're added as different blocks that are grouped together you can change the color setting of each individual block. So that is a way to get around this if WordPress is being weird. There's always work grounds. Yeah. And if you're comfortable with CSS you can just change it manually and you don't have to worry about it. I really like that color recommender site there coolers, especially for people like me or like us that are not graphic designers so you're not trained to know these colors match these ones don't and you just might do whatever. It's a, yeah, definitely very helpful. I basically live on this site now. Cause I wouldn't know it now. I will, oh, I'll actually copy this into the chat if you had wanted this link. Yeah, coolers.co, C-O-O-L-O-R-S. You might have already typed it out but it's in there if you need it. And I might use this one or two more times so I'll leave it open just in case. Oh, I like that melon color. I might use that later. So this is how you would make it look the way that you want this way but now the preview in Elementor looks a little different. So the preview instead of being in the button in the upper right, there is a preview changes option that'll go into the desktop mode and there's also a responsive mode. So if you click on this, it will let you switch and toggle between your mobile tablet and desktop and it will also let you switch around how this looks in different modes. So if you go into the responsive mode and go into tablet or go into the cell phone option you can click into this block, go into content, change the columns to one so that you have one full image you can go into the responsive mode so that you have one full image going across. And now when you go back into your desktop mode you'll be able to see kind of the different changes. And you can see that it is way easier to see that image in a phone one across than it is three across. And there's also an option. Let me go into the settings here. So this is one I might actually have to look up a tutorial for myself to remind myself how to do it but there's an option that you can change the different settings based on the mode that you are in. So you can make it a one column layout in mobile and then a three column layout in desktop. You can do that in regular coding but this one will let you do it in WordPress style coding. I just need to now that you know it's possible you can look for the tutorial to do it but I would actually have to look that up again myself to remind myself. And so these are the page settings themselves. So if you remember the Gutenberg editor it on the right hand side it had the page and block settings. Elementor has a similar thing but in so the block settings we were just in these are the page settings that will let you change like remove that sidebar and it'll let you change out so this page layout down here in the settings in the page settings will let you remove that sidebar so one column no sidebar and it eventually will pop out. There we go. So now that's gone. And so you can also add in different options here. The other thing that I'll feature is the video option. It is 1101 so I'll try not to take up a ton of time here but I'll just wanted to show this just because it is an awesome feature. So let me go to the plus sign go to this one column hit the plus column go to the video drag and drop it and you can copy and paste your link but if you are doing a tutorial you can also manually set the start and end time. So if it's a one hour long video but you only need about five minutes of it you can specify where it'll start and stop. And you can also choose to like which controls and options that will display on the player. And you can also change around and player around with the display settings on here. Add your background, add a border, do what you will with it but it just lets you customize a whole lot more. So did we have any questions about this? I haven't seen anything. Yeah, if anybody has any questions go ahead and get them typed in. Just let you know as I made a sense in a couple of minutes after 11, we started a few minutes after 10 so that's okay. But if you have any questions or if there's anything you wanna see or have for show we'll keep going until you've had all your questions answered she's shown everything she needs to everything's being recorded. So if you do have to leave because you only allowed it an hour to watch with us that's okay, you'll be able to watch the full recording later. Somebody had any questions yet during the show so you do get them typed in. So just to touch on the last little bit about plugins and themes I'm going to show you how to get out of Elementor once you've been in it. Naturally, once you've set up your page the way that you would want it to be you can publish it or you can hit this upward arrow to save it as a draft or a template. But once you've saved it or published it the way that you want you can go into you can click on the settings. The settings icon will make sure that this little hamburger menu shows up. Click the hamburger menu and go to exit to dashboard. I'm not gonna save this because it was a demonstration page but this is how you would get back into the main editor. I don't know why they didn't make that an easier button to find like I would just put it in the bottom but okay. Now you know. And so we'll go back into any of you switch back over to the WordPress editor it will convert it over into the blocks. So I would recommend just giving it an Elementor. So I'm going to cancel it keep the current layout. All right, so if you are running through the Nebraska libraries on the web there's a few plugin updates that you might want to know about. So the slide shows plugin that you used to use to add in well it's to make slide shows. I would recommend not even using this anymore just because these two other editors it's already baked in there and eventually I will be removing these slideshow plugins just because the fewer plugins the better it fights with the different themes less and it's already baked in really easy to use with the new editors. And WP forms I'm keeping just because I heart WP forms. And so the other thing that you want to pay attention to is the type of calendar that you're using. This calendar was it's been on Nebraska libraries on the web since the dawn of time but now it's kind of having it looks like it hasn't been updated. So there's been issues with the events not actually loading into the pages the way that it's supposed to it'll just show up as like an empty calendar block. So if you've run into that go into the events manager it looks like a little calendar with a shield events manager has a lot more customization options it will display as a calendar or a list and it supports single events and recurring events. So if you have a story hour that shows up once a week or once a month you only have to load it in once and then let the plug in know when that is and then it will automatically populate it and load it in for you. I'm also eventually going to be getting rid of table press because there's now an option to add and customize your own tables using the regular editors. So now that this plug in is no longer necessary it's going to be shifted over to just the regular editors because if the editor can do it, why add an extra step? And I'm not actually sure how many libraries we're still using table press but I know there were some I haven't checked all the way through yet. I talked to the briefly about the social like box and feed. Facebook is no longer letting the images switch over shift over to Facebook unless you're in the paid version and it's just easier probably to upload it individually or there's other, if you go through Jetpack Jetpack has social media plugins Jetpack has free to use and it's a different way to integrate your social media with WordPress. I'm still exploring different plugins that'll let you do that better now that everything shifted over for privacy security reasons but I'm still trying to find a better solution for that. If you know of one, let me know. And iHeart Elementor, we all know that. And there's also if you are using a specific theme the theme updates that I'd like to cover are make sure it's responsive and make sure it has a heavy customization level. When you are previewing different themes or testing out different themes I will show you kind of what I look for in that. I'm going into appearance and Nirvana settings. Nirvana is my theme. So I look for to make sure it has all these different customization options. So make sure that it'll let you customize your layout make sure it'll let you customize header and you can activate and deactivate presentation page. This is kind of the new direction that WordPress themes have gone into. So this is going to let you play around with different layouts more easily and it'll let you more heavily customize things so that it'll look the way that you want. Some of the older themes that have been around since the dawn of time they won't have all these options. And then you'll have kind of a headache with being able to customize even the smallest things. And you'll also might have a headache with responsive design with some of the older themes. And it is also mattering less and less which exact theme you choose just because the customization for pages is so much easier. And you can also customize your own homepage just by going into appearance and customize. And you can create a page that you actually want to be your homepage. And you can turn that page into your new homepage instead of messing around with the presentation page settings on your own theme or trying to mess around with other things. And you can turn your posts into any page that you want to now instead of always having to make it your homepage. And so that is one thing I wanted to touch on quickly there. I think it's nice there's so much more customization to it so that all the sites do not look so cookie cutter. You can really personalize it to what you like to have and how you like yours to work. I know some people may think, we're doing this Nebraska Libraries in the web program that any Nebraska public library can get a free website. They don't all have to look the same though. Yours will look how you want to. You know. And there's a mess of themes that are available. I was thinking about not clicking on this just because I do have some older themes that are still on the collection. We're still shifting over to the newer stuff. But so if you look over like Nirvana or Astra or Bota, Chip Life, Dara, these are some of the newer themes. And you can start to kind of think about like the major thing that you're going to be more or less locked into is the format of this top menu and sometimes the header. You can make your header disappear and not even deal with it if you had wanted to. But the main thing to think about when you choose the theme is the way this looks like and the way it'll let you customize your background colors. But other than that, like the page itself is really customizable and you can even pull out and remove the whole mess and just make your own thing using Elementor or using something else. So that's why it's mattering less and less and less which exact theme you choose as long as it has the customization options. Yeah, you do whatever you want to it. Yeah. I just default to Nirvana just because I'm used to it. Maybe there's better themes, maybe not, but yeah. That's why there's so many options there. Yeah, go with what speaks to you. Yeah, cool, but I think it's 11-11 now. So I think I pretty much covered the basics. I'll wait a few minutes, see if there's any questions that pop in. But other than that, I'll probably leave it at that. Okay. Why don't you get your context slide up there for your last bit? Oh, so yeah. Yeah. So yes, if anyone does want to reach out to Amanda, if you are a Nebraska library who wants a website, Lambasca Public Library, reach out to her and she'll get you set up. If you have one you haven't worked on for a long time, reach out to her and she will help you get it updated, get you back into it if you, you know, some lost access. I know we've had, we do, there's staff changes happen at libraries. So some people, there may be new directors who don't realize or don't know how to get into the website that you may have available to you. So definitely contact Amanda to get back into that. You know where I am. Yeah. But it doesn't look like anybody has any urgent questions right now. Thank you, great presentation, Connie says. Yes. You're welcome, Connie. All right, I am gonna pull presenter control back to my screen. There we go. And all right. So that'll wrap it up for today's show. And before we get into my wrap up here, I'm gonna talk about next week, Amanda will be back with us. She has, if you look here and I'll let you talk about it too, a four part series starting next week on teaching technology in the library. And you can see we've got part one, two, three, four coming up June 2nd, June 16th, July 14th, July 28th. Amanda, do you wanna talk about this that we're starting up next week? So this is the teaching technology in the library. Would you open up the preview of the online course? Yes. So these are the pages that I'm building out for teaching tech in the library. And if you scroll down just a touch. So this is basically a way to build out new library services and kind of expand your different options in terms of connecting people with digital and technology skills that they actually need to reach their goals. So the who is learning and why will help you figure out what people actually need, what matters most. The different problems people are trying to solve and what's most relevant to them. Like what are the problems that are important enough to take action and what are people gonna spend time on? And how to help people articulate what their problem is because nine times out of 10, when people come in to ask a question, that's not actually what they need. It just what they thought to ask. And then it'll, a lot of it plays on what libraries already do. So a lot of it's going to sound familiar, but it's just going to integrate more tech options and figure out kind of new user experience options and different methods of figuring this stuff out. So, go ahead. Oh, sorry. So the webinar series is going to go over and introduce a lot of these different topics and it will demonstrate how to use the tools and resources and how to chart your own course and kind of personalize how you're doing this in your own library. So it'll give you different activity options and some different worksheet options to run through. And then it'll also, if you are a Nebraska library, you can also take this for extra CE credit if you would want to submit a resource into a shared digital skills resource. And this stuff is a whole lot easier when we actually just deal with it together just because there's so much of it. Yeah, so the Encompass Live four-part webinar series on teaching technology in the library is an intro to that full online course that you'll be able to take. So definitely do sign up for those sessions. At any of our other shows we have come up here and on our schedule, as you can see, in between and Amanda's sessions, we've got other topics coming up. Our regular Pretty Sweet Tech, we back at the end of June, Spatial for Librarians, a 3D meeting space and some other things have you. So definitely sign up for anything you see here. Our archives are right here underneath our upcoming shows, as I mentioned. So if you want to search in our archives, this is where today's recording will be. It should be up and ready by the end of the day tomorrow as long as go-to webinar and YouTube cooperate with me. I'll have a link to the recording and a link to Amanda's slides. So you have access to those. Everyone who attended today and registered today's show will get an email from me letting you know that recording is available here. I'll show you here. You can search our archives for any previous shows if you want to on any topics. You can search the full archives or there's the most recent year if you want to, the most recent 12 months. That's because this is the full archives for Encompass Live. I'm not gonna scroll all the way down, but Encompass Live premiered in January, 2009. So we have over 10 years worth of recordings here. That's a lot. So some of the information here will stand the test of time, book reviews, some of the training, some services, it all depends. But some things may become old and outdated. Services or resources may no longer exist anymore or have changed dramatically. Links may no longer work, it all depends. So just pay attention to the original broadcast date of anything you watch on here. Everything has a date, so you know when it first happened. So you take that in consideration when you're watching and the content of a particular episode. But we'll always keep our full archives here as long as we have somewhere to post them for us. We're librarians, that's what we do. We save and archive things for historical purposes. We also have a Facebook page. You can save links here for Encompass Live. If you like to use Facebook, give us a like over there. We post reminders about shows coming up. Here's a reminder to log in to today's show. Announcements about our presenters, when our recordings are available. So if you do like to, you can follow us there. We also do use our hashtag, little abbreviation and comp live on other social media, Twitter, Instagram. I'm not sure what else we're using. So definitely keep on us everywhere else. So that wraps it up for today's show. Thank you everybody for being with us here this morning. Thank you Amanda for being here with us today. And we'll see you next week, definitely Amanda and some of you join us on a future episode of Encompass Live. All right, bye-bye.