 Okay, 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 online event. We are a webinar, some people call these things, some people webcasts, online show. Nobody can agree on the terminology and some people have strong feelings about some of the terminology, but whatever you want to describe this as, we are here live, online, every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time. If you're unable to join us on Wednesday mornings, that's fine. We do record the show every week and it is posted onto our website for you to watch later, and I'll show you at the end of today's episode where you can go and see all of our archives. Both our live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So if you have any colleagues, friends, neighbors, family, anybody really who's interested in any of the topics we have on the show, let them know. Send them to our website. They can sign up and watch any of our upcoming shows or watch any of our recordings. We do have recordings available going all the way back to the beginning of the show, which is January 2009. So there is some old stuff on there, some archival things. Some things may be outdated, but we're librarians, so that's what we do. We archive and save things, so be aware when you're watching something how old it might be. But we have new things added every week. We do a – both the recording is posted on there. If there are any handouts or slides like the presentation we have here today, that's included. And any websites that are mentioned in the show by any of our presenters I say even to our delicious account, but we collect all bookmarks that we've made of different websites and that's made available to you as well. So you have access to everything after the show. We do a mixture of things here on Encompass Live, interviews, book reviews, demos, sometimes a little mini-training sessions. We only have an hour or so, not anything incredibly in-depth. The only criteria really is that it is something related to libraries. Something libraries are actually doing, a product or service we think they might benefit from. Sometimes things a little out of the box. You might see some titles of some of our shows and you're like, I don't get it, why is the Library Commission, the Rascal Library Commission doing this? But trust me, everything comes around to libraries in the end. That's my only criteria for the show. We do have guest speakers that come in sometimes to do presentations, but we also have our own Nebraska Library Commission staff that do sessions for us here on Encompass Live, and that's what we have this morning. To my left here is Craig Lefteroff. He is our Technology Innovation Librarian at the Library Commission. Good morning, Craig. Good morning. And he organizes, coordinates, runs, I don't know what the term is. Is it fun? Yeah, our Nebraska Library is on the web project, which is about WordPress sites for public libraries. And I'm just going to hand it over to you to explain what it's all about and how libraries can use it. Sounds good. Thank you for having me. Well, I'm not going to PowerPoint you guys to death, but I do have a few slides that I wanted to show you just to give you a feel for what the network entails and what I do. I am more or less the sort of customer service side of our project, so I help libraries build their websites. I help them find plugins to meet their needs. And I also create the new sites and work with libraries to essentially shape those into what they need to serve their patrons or customers. Just to let you know in advance of any questions, I don't do anything with a server, so I'm not the tech guy. If you have any questions about that sort of thing, I can certainly get answers for you, but not today. I'll have to get back to you. This is how our main page looks. We are a network of websites provided to the Nebraska libraries at no cost. We currently have over 100 sites. Those do include a few in-house sites so we can do plugin testing or have pages for training and things like that. Otherwise, it's strictly for Nebraska public libraries or the public library systems here in the state. And right now we have 230 users on the network. Those have different levels of power. They range from the super admins who can more or less do anything to people who are subscribers and they're just essentially consumers. They can only get the information that's posted on the sites. So quite a lot on our network. It runs pretty well given the demands. It's been running for seven years now. And one thing that is different for us compared to other WordPress multi-site networks is we run on a Windows server. I think that's probably still a rarity with WordPress. Most people go with Linux servers. I know you said you don't know much about servers, but I think that's a state thing. I know the state of Nebraska is very Windows-centric. We may be restricted by them. Not my choice that we're necessarily on. But we're working together. It works, obviously. Yeah, most of the time it's fine. It does make it a little more interesting when something goes wrong. It's harder to find stuff just by searching on the Internet for Windows server fixes and things like that. But it keeps things exciting. This is how we make a new site. We have a plugin which I'll address in a minute called NSCloner. So we essentially have a default site set up that has a lot of content already populated. We just make a copy of that. And then I work with the libraries from there to build it into the form that they want. So this is the default site. When we make a clone, this is how the clone looks. It's a one-to-one relationship. At that point, we can go in and adjust the theme. The theme being basically what controls the look and the feel of each site. So they start off with 2010. But if they want, we can switch it over to something else, like one of these other very colorful options. This is the theme that's running on our main page as you'll see in a moment. We can go really out there with the theme. There are all kinds of different options. And with each theme, you get different capabilities. So some themes, you can only change the text or the colors. But some themes allow you to manipulate every aspect of the site. So you can do social icons, as you can see, graphics, menus, widgets, and so on. You can get really creative with it if you want to really dive in there. Yeah, absolutely. And that's one of the things I really like about our library sites. You can see a lot of diversity between the sites. Everybody has their own take on what they're doing and what they want their patrons to see. So the look and the feel changes quite a bit from site to site. If none of our themes works for a library, I can create a child theme, which basically takes the existing theme that controls the site's look and feel and adds some additional functionality. So if they don't like that particular image at the top right there, we can change it and keep everything else the same just by creating a child theme. Basically, it just inherits everything. I add some CSS to change the look and feel, and then we go from there. Okay, I did mention plugins a second ago, so I wanted to address that. Those are basically tools that let us expand the functionality of a particular site so they can do all kinds of different things. They can block malicious queries, hackers, and stuff like that. They can add calendars. They can add weather, Pinterest buttons, Facebook buttons, all that sort of stuff. One of the ones that we use for our site is WordFence, which is a security plugin. And what it does is basically if somebody tries to use a particular username to kind of keep hacking away at our login to try to get into our site, after a certain amount of failed attempts, it will lock them out. So we don't have a username logmire on our site. That kind of made me laugh. But it also tells me where these attacks are coming from, and a lot of them are actually from Eastern Europe. Sadly enough, it's my ancestry. I'm sure it's not your fault. Yeah, it's my fault. That's common, though, yeah. And I'm sure people are thinking, why would they care about these little sites in Nebraska? Well, a lot of these programs are automated, so they just blindly go out and look for any word for a site. Once they find one, it's like, try to get in. Maybe this one we can break into and do something. Yeah, yeah. I've had questions from libraries about why would they want to attack us. We don't have credit card information or banking, but sometimes it's just automated. And sometimes it's just, the reasons they do it isn't always to get your banking or private entry. It's just sometimes hackers do this for the thrill of doing it. And they never know which site's going to have the good information, too. It's fishing out for anything, yeah. Yeah, you're absolutely correct. Now word fence, that's across any site that we host. We automatically put that on. It is, yes. And we do additional security measures. We have some things that happen at the server level, and we also do periodic backup. So in the worst case, we'd be able to restore the original form of the site. Another plugin that we use is Jetpack, which does a whole lot of different things. WordFence is essentially just a security plugin. Jetpack does a myriad of things. It has that protection functionality, so it protects against hackers as well. It also does sharing and publicizing, which is important to some of our libraries. They have Facebook pages, they have Pinterest pages or Twitter's, and they don't want to have to duplicate all that content manually. So Jetpack pushes the stuff out to all these different places. They only have to type their winter hours or about a special program one time, and it goes to all these various places. It also adds functionality for the end users. So if people are reading a post about a children's program and they want to share it with their friends on Facebook, they can just click the share button, and it goes right out. Easy push to Facebook. Yeah, absolutely. And that is the end of the slide portion. Are there any questions so far? I don't know. Anybody have any questions about the basics of what we're offering here? Now you're going to have to see live demo of all these things. Go ahead and type anything in if you do, as Craig's continuing along. Just to give you guys a feel for the whole security side, I cleaned out our spam folder yesterday for the main site, and in just a second you'll see there's already 33 comments from people. Wow. Yeah, just over the course of a day. When I come back from the weekends lately, it's around 100. So we have all these bots who are hitting us and either trying to get into the site or just leaving ridiculous off-topic spam. With links to malicious sites that they want you to click on and go to. Right, exactly. Yep, but with our site you basically have a one button option to empty the spam, so you don't necessarily have to go through all this stuff, trying to sell you gold from France or whatever. You can just say empty spam and it takes care of it for you. Is this something libraries do themselves or you do this on behalf of them for their own sites? They would have to do this themselves. Fortunately they don't get hit with quite as much as we do here at the main site for whatever reason. So ordinarily they'll just have one or two spam comments over the course of a few weeks. And comments are something you want to keep track of anyways in case someone valid is sending you a comment that you want to reply to. Correct. You need to see that and approve that they can post it if that's how you do your comments and then, yeah. Our system works really well for filtering out the spam versus the legitimate comments. Ordinarily comments would end up here so you'd have a number. And those come from people who are manually just typing stuff into the page, questions or comments or whatever. It recognizes that there's kind of a format for people who are spamming, so it looks for those links out to the gold sites or whatever sort of front that's trying to sell you something. So give me just one second to switch over here and type things correctly. I created a new site for us yesterday. So I just want to show you that eventually. This keyboard has been having some issues lately. It's not you. Alright. Everyone has used it. Okay, so this is what a library would receive from the back end when we create a new site for them. Let me just show you the end user public side. So it looks almost exactly like the clone site that I showed you before. It has stuff already included so they don't have to start necessarily from scratch. We assume that everybody's going to need a calendar. They might want a contact page, a kid's page, and then just a Nebraska Resources page. If the library doesn't want this stuff, they can always change the name of the pages. They can delete things, add things, and so on. And they can change things from either the back side, which has everything kind of all in one place. You've got all these tools that are available, or you can work from the site so you can see what you're doing as you go along. So if I click on Customize, it tells me what theme I'm running. If I want to change this, I can do it at one click. So let's check out Vota and see how it looks. Quite a bit more slimmed down, I think. Okay, so back to 2010. Try to change that one more time. Now, these themes that this gives you are all the ones that you either... We already found four libraries to offer them, or they've asked to have added to the options. Correct, yes. Themes and plugins are almost like collections of books. You have to go in and read them periodically and add new things. I know they become... If they're not kept up by whoever has created them, some things can break, and sometimes certain themes won't work with what you might want to do, so we don't always allow every single request. So if you don't see something here, there's lots of places to find other themes and things. You go find one and then say, Craig, here's one I'd like to do something we could possibly... Yeah, sure. And if there is something that you sort of like, but that has issues, we can definitely work around that too. As I said, we can create child themes and make all sorts of options and changes to the theme itself. So if you like it... A lot of them are customizable. Absolutely. One thing you'll notice with themes is that they all have different functionality. So if you wanted something in particular, you can find a theme that allows you to manipulate the margins of the page or that allows you to move images from one side to another. You can also, if you're confident enough, add CSS directly to your site here. And for people who are brand new, CSS. CSS is basically styling the controls. It's code that controls the look or the position of certain things. So it can make an image bigger. It can move it from the left side to the right side. So rather than using the just built-in click-and-drop type things, you're actually doing coding. Right. If you know that. Yep. I've never gotten into that because it's a little too scary for me. But I've done HTML code and basic website coding, so I'm assuming it's... This is not super, super intensive. What you basically do is find your element on the page. I usually do this. So in Firefox, find my little thing, and then just add some code that changes it. Can you see it tells you there what the different things you'd be doing there? So if I decide I want the border to be something other than this sort of gray color, I could just copy this stuff, put it in my CSS section, and change it to red or pink or whatever I want to add. You do have the option to add header images, background images. You can do stuff with your menus and widgets, which are fun. So let me go back to that. So we'll just keep this up on the screen here while I mess around. If you guys do have questions, please let me know. Widgets are sort of similar to plugins. They're basically just tools that allow you to do more with your website. We have all sorts of widgets. We have multiple calendars. We have Google Calendar, Google Translator, Pinterest stuff. A text widget, which is kind of like an empty box. You can put whatever you want into it, and that does accept HTML. So if people wanted to add a Facebook button, that's how we do it. Basically, just go to the text widget, copy the Facebook code, and then it's good to go. For now, I'm just going to add a weather underground widget to our primary widget area. So this is how the page looks now. Click Add Widget. It should be all set, and we'll refresh the page. And there it is. The location could not be found. So you do have to put in yours looks good or something. Right, exactly. This takes an exceedingly long time. I'm not going to worry about it. But you see, even with just this simple widget, you have all kinds of different options. Wow, all the different ways you can have it look too. Yeah, it goes on and on and on. All that just for the weather. Absolutely. Okay, so let's see how it turned out. Chances of a thunderstorm. Yeah, it was thundering earlier. It's unfortunate we've had such nice days. So that is basically appearance and some of the things you can do with the sites. We also have basically pages and posts which comprise the content of the site. So pages would be the stuff, calendar, contact, Nebraska resources. And post is something like this Hello World post. When people create a post, they can add all kinds of stuff to it. It doesn't just have to be text. So we have the option to insert slideshow, which is moving images. You can do that in a second. You can add media. So if you have photos of an event, like a book club or a maker event, you can add those right into a post. You can set a post to publish ahead of time. So if you know that you're going to be closed and you want a post to come out saying we're closed today, you can set it to sort of arrive on that day. You can set a featured image. That's helpful if you're sharing the stuff on Facebook. That means that you'll have a little image from the post that appears on your Facebook page. And you can publicize as well. So you can decide, I want this to go out to Facebook and I don't want it to go to Pinterest or Twitter. You can control that pretty much on any of the lists. That comes from Jetpack, that you connect to all of your particular accounts. It does, that's great. Okay, so our site seems to be loading a bit slowly. Sorry about that. This is our main page. This is pretty much the hub of what we do. So there's all kinds of stuff here. There's online training, a contact page, stuff about participation. And also our participating libraries, which is where I usually direct people who are seeing someone interested so they can see what other places are doing and say, I want something like this. That'd be good for... if you want to ask another librarian what they've done with it, how difficult it was, get some tips and ideas from them. I'm sure any of these libraries would be happy to talk to you. I think they would. And I'm really proud of what a lot of libraries have been doing, a lot of their designs and the stuff that they're putting on their sites. It was really great. So I want to show you a few of those while I'm at it. Okay, this is Palisade. And they have a nice slider here at the top. They include images in their posts. They've got a calendar, so it's a lot of stuff happening here. Actually, they've also added on the right the links to some of the resources that we provide, in addition to the Nebraska... the Nebraska Resources page, that's something that we pre-fill with links to things we do. Over on the one you set up for Encompass. Yeah, this one here. Yep. If it will load. Yeah. Right. It has a list of stuff that they could keep or if they don't necessarily want to have pay a ticket and so on, they can always... So this is like some default things that we've thought... Well, obviously our Nebraska Access to Nebraska Memories is one of both things here, but most commonly, possibly useful for a library. But that can all be tweaked if they want. Certainly. But I see rather than just having links, Palisade has put in the... like logos from a couple of things that we have. Yeah, it makes the site pop a little bit. It makes the stuff stand out. So it's, in my opinion, a little better than just looking at a list of things. So they've been really great with their design. That's Palisade. North Bend, a different design as you can see. It's basically... they're kind of doing the same thing. They've got their Friegel link here. There's their Overdrive link. They do have a slideshow here at the top. So that's all their posts that they wanted to spotlight. That's hilarious. No. In their menu... I like that they have that slot where they can click through the different highlighted posts there at the top. Yeah, it's great. It just gives them a little snippet, and then if they want more, they can go straight to the full post. So it's really neat. They have a ton of stuff in their menu here, library policies. Anything you want to know is right there when you load the page. So it's all right there at your fingertips. And they always do a lot of images, which I love. There's the Facebook thing that I mentioned. Pinterest. Green coverbooks and so on. And they do have the translate option working as well. So if you have people who don't speak English, you know, who want to get your content in their language, they can easily do it. Let's see what it looks like in Spanish. Nice. And this is a Google translate thing? Yeah, it's just a widget that we include. So any library can take advantage of that. That's great. There are so many who talk about libraries. We've got a lot of immigrants coming to Nebraska already here. Sure. And it's even getting even more. So that's awesome. And I know we've got a lot of guys who are working on trying to get them to come into the libraries and use the free resources we have. Yeah, anything that we can do to reach out is probably, you know, for the best, I think. So that's North Bend. Let's see. Okay. This is another one, Alliance. They chose a different path. They do have large slides. So basically, it's really visual right when you load up the page. You can click through. It gives you some nice animation. There's the Risenio. And the Book Club. And they do have their menu options right up here at the top too. So those drop down give you a ton of pages to see. They've got Facebook or RSS and their contact page here. And they're just extremely focused on this tiles and visuals. So, really neat. Nice. I like how this one, like some of them, lots of WordPress sites by default, they give you these, I think, kind of urge you. Put in a header image that's like at the top and above your name. And this is a totally different way. It's just the library's name. And then below that, right off the bat, here's your menu. And then here's our stuff. Yeah. It really stands out. We have lots of different options as far as arrangements. So some people like to have that header at the top. A lot more libraries after that. But then we have other structures that they can implement as well. So a lot of choices. And the last thing that I wanted to show you is one of our system sites, Three Rivers. And I'm not picking favorites. A lot of our sites are great. And I should probably, let me go back to this page. I think that they use something that's not Three Rivers as their URL. Oh. Oh, they did their acronym. TRLS. Yep. This isn't necessarily focused totally on overwhelming you with visuals, but it gives you a ton of information. And I love the black and the white for their color scheme. They have all kinds of stuff here in their menu. So anything that you want to know about them is right there. And then if you just scroll down the page, you get Pinterest. You get all these posts that have little icons and visuals. So a lot of different options as far as your look and so on for your page. I think that's a good tip. I mean, research. People will be researching this stuff for years. Graphics and images catch people's attention more than just to block words. And also feeding it, as you said earlier, feeding them into your Facebook or Twitter or whatever, including a featured image or something that also makes that carry through. We'll get people's attention more. Yeah, absolutely. That's why I like it so easy when you're creating a post that the ad media, tons of times for our commission blog, all you do is click and drag any pictures, images, whatever you have on your computer, and you can click and drag and drop it right into your post. Absolutely. So we have 81 themes basically on our network. And you can choose from those. If you are looking for something that's not included, as Christa said, you can always get in touch and we'll definitely accommodate that. Once you do have a site set up, if you go to Customize as I showed you before, you can switch out the theme and try out different things. So if you don't like what you have with 2010, once it loads up, there are all kinds of different options here for you to explore. It kind of cuts everything out with that one. Yeah. And some of this stuff, as you can see, is sort of meant for consumer size, like shop settings and so on. So not everything might be useful, you know, relevant to you, but you can just ignore it. Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So this is Battle Creek. This basically was a library that was using an old theme that was no longer supported. We upgraded our server and it ended up blocking out some of the things that were on their page. So this is actually using the same theme that I used for, sorry, I can't type today, this guy. So this is identical to this, even though it looks different because of all the CSS that I added. This changed in the color. Yep, that was it. And it basically looks quite a bit different in terms of the color and also the image and so on. How much space is here at the top compared to that. So you can make all those changes via our site pretty easily. That's not really a lot of coding to get that difference. No, the littlest thing can make it totally, their page look totally unique from someone else. So it's not like you have to spend, I don't know, so much time picking colors and themes and designs and I just want my information out there. You don't have to, just a couple of tweaks and you're done and then start pushing out the actual info and put your line of view and resources and programs and events and everything. Absolutely. Any questions so far before I move on to... No, if you have any questions, type them into the questions section of your GoToWebinar interface. Craig, could you show you anything in any of these sites here to look at any of the features and how things work? Okay. I know sometimes you can get bogged out. I was just going to say, I've designed websites. I want to design, you know, some for commission, some personal ones. Sometimes you can get really caught up in all the different themes and which one do I really want and spend hours and hours getting lost on that rabbit hole? Right. So maybe just simple things is a better way to go unless you lose half your morning, you know, trying to decide which color blue do I like here instead. Yeah, yeah, that's really unfortunate. It can be fun, but yeah. Yeah. If you guys are interested in our page or our service, I would recommend going here just libraries.ne.gov, and that takes you right to our main blog. I have been sort of adding periodically posts to this page, but essentially you'll want to start up here on the menu. So there's a participation page. Excuse me. I don't know why we're moving so slowly today. This gives you all the info that you need, explains themes and everything that I've mentioned during the program today. It tells you about the URL. Most of the time it's libraries.ne.gov slash whatever city you're in. And then tells you all about the sort of back stuff, back side of things that we do with security and backups and so on. The online training page has tons of videos, and those were basically created by my predecessor, Michael Towers. I've also been working on a beginner's guide here that I'm eventually going to migrate over to the site itself. So that's all static information. It's just text and images, so you don't necessarily have to watch a whole video to get an answer. So these videos were done then, I mean, Michael's been a couple of years. WordPress has updates itself, regularly different versions, but some of those videos, it's still, you know, pretty accurate. Yeah, for the basics, this is all still good information. Posting is still the same, you know. That's good to know, because I know sometimes this happens with our databases that we have issues with. They update their system or update something, and all of our training is just thrown out, because they've changed things so much that nothing we've previously created or trained is valid anymore. But that's, I think that maybe will make people feel more comfortable with WordPress if they won't suddenly have no clue when something is updated. Those videos are still usable, that's awesome. Yeah, absolutely. The basic structure of WordPress in terms of creating content has really changed. They more or less added stuff that allow you to tweak your page. They've added new functionality. The CSS is a good example. That was something that was new with the last WordPress updates, and now I don't have to... But it didn't change, it was already there. I just added on to another way you can work with it. Exactly. So all that's here. Another thing that I recommend is just go into participating libraries and just look at some of the sites, see what they're doing and see what you can do. We have a ton of different participants, and they use their site to varying levels. Some people are on there multiple times a day. Some people post once a week. It just depends on how much time you have and what you want to do with your page. And what you have going on at your library, how much you need to be updating. And what I also like, I know some people this and Facebook and Twitter, having to another place where I've got to promote and post and remember to do something. I love that all of those things, specifically talking about WordPress, have the scheduling a post and you mentioned it before, you can post immediately or you can specify I want to have gotten this date at this time. So you can block off an hour or something, couple hours in the morning on Monday to create all of your posts for the week that will then just automatically post for you as that date comes up. Every day I got to go and do something. You don't. You just got to pick one day and get it all in there and then just let it do its own thing. It makes it much more convenient. So you're going to have to update your header there. It says 150 libraries. You said there's 100 something now. I've really been thinking about that. I'm going to have to fire up the GIL program and do my little Photoshop thing. Is that a graphic that was created? That's not just text that we can change, I guess. Yeah, I don't know either. Let's try it. I think it's a graphic but not mistaken. Oh wow, it's not. Okay, so let's change it. Look right here. I thought it looked like a thing that had been created too. Yeah, I just assumed. I guess that was my mistake. So thanks, Chris. You learned something new? Yeah. If anyone watching is interested in participating, there's a contact page here. You can send me a message. You can always give me a call as well. I'd be happy to talk with you and go over what we can do and that sort of thing. My phone number is right here on the page and they do make you Right, you have to do some math which is a bummer. So I went into librarianship because it wasn't supposed to be math. Yeah, I know. So anybody have any questions? Anything more you want to know? Be on what I keep asking. I may be jumping in and asking the questions for people. That's fine. I could ask you some questions. Me? Okay. You use WordPress to create your site for the conference every year. Yes, big talk in small libraries. How difficult do you find it to work with posts and do some of this design stuff for the page? It's been pretty easy. For doing the posts, that's the same as what we do on our site. But you, Craig, you've helped me out with some of the things. That slider theme that one library had, we switched to that one for big talk as well. Which I thought was really cool. I think I was even able to do that first, but then I went in on myself and squished something around. I'm kind of a brave person when it comes to online things, which may be good or not good, depending on what I do. But I just went in there, once Craig had said, here's this theme that is different and put in the pictures of our local libraries in there. I just went in the next year and started poking around in things and said, well, is there somewhere I can change it? What can I do on my own? And I was able to take out a page and update it. And we move things. And do we have archives in there? We have to keep moving things one page to another and figuring out the hierarchy of the pages. Yeah, it takes a little bit of thought, but it's not really that hard. No, it takes some thought and planning. And for this kind of thing, that's just an annual. It's at one time a year. We have a lot of activity. We usually are from November through March is when everything's happening. But all the recordings are there. Yeah, I've not had much and that was when I did more design work on as far as how it sets up. Our commission blog is done on WordPress. I just post that, which is a simple thing. Yeah, that would be it there. And you can see the sliders and it's got the libraries. And those are all pictures of small libraries here in Nebraska that our staff has gone out over the years. Some of them might be old pictures, but they were taking our libraries. And the menu basically accommodates pretty much all those old conferences. Yeah, and we just keep adding to the previous conferences over there. We have to update our date for next year. I'm not sure. I haven't really confirmed, but usually it's the last Friday in February, so shoot for that. So that will be updated at some point. Because you mentioned using GIMP to create images. GIMP is like a free version of Photoshop. Yeah. So that's something that I've had you do because I don't, that's the one thing. Creating actual images, I know you do that, Alana has sometimes, that's kind of above my desires. Well, I'm not great artist, but this is pretty much what I can do in GIMP. But it is helpful to have it. And for a lot of our libraries that are trying to manipulate their images or something in their header, I always recommend GIMP and another program called IrfanView to help them shrink things down. Oh yeah. Yeah, so they can just grab a little portion of a photo and stick it right in their header, and that's the first thing people see on their page. They can clean up things with GIMP automatically. They can make it look a little more artistic. You guys can see that as kind of a watercoloury thing. I know you did some manipulation of some of the pictures that we had to make them a little different from just the snapshot. Yeah. No, I've had a lot of, I actually kind of find it fun. I like the creative and picking things. This site I've done every year, years ago I also worked on 2011, 2012, our technology planning conference that we did is on here as well. And it's not as advanced as it was a few years ago, but it was the design and what colour schemes we can use and what not. So. Yeah, but on the whole I think it's pretty easy. Oh yeah. I mean we didn't have this slider before. We had just a static picture. There was just a header picture like before. Two or three years ago I said I want to do something different. Is there some way we can incorporate more of our libraries? Big talk is for all public libraries across the country, but I wanted to give a little shout out to ours. Sure. And so Craig came up with this as an option. I was like oh that's cool. Can we do that? Yeah. Yeah, right now there's a page that I take on and off from here actually regularly. The submit a proposal and registration. Oh, registration is there still, but that's closed down, but there's a page and a slider thing that will come out when we first look for new speakers. We put a call out and so I'm able to add that into there just from the customised behind the scene. And what's cool is you don't have to recreate it every time. You just either hide it or just, but it still saves it in your WordPress end, I guess, and then you just make it live again. And then you make it not public, that's what it's public or un-public, and it just saves it. So things like that that you're only doing on summer reading. You only do that once a year. That might be something you might put on and take off of your website because you don't want people looking for summer reading stuff in December of current events or things. You can really make your site totally not static where you're adding and taking off things like that and full on pages depending on when things go on. It's just so easy, yeah. Yeah, that's what I really love about WordPress. It gives you a lot of power, but you don't necessarily have to do the old thing of looking at code or starting from scratch and just, I'm going to be here all day typing this HTML and maybe I can make something happen. It's more or less just a one-click kind of thing. I did start when we, and I first came here oh gosh, what did we use? My previous job maybe we used Dreamweaver or something way, way old, yeah. I've been around for a while. And we did something else here that it was doing coding and it was a lot more difficult to update things on the website. And I can't remember what it was that I used here, but it was painful and it was something you set up a page and you did it once and you said it is what it is and don't ask me to do anything else. And now on the fly you can make a quickie change whether it's a word, like this is a full on WordPress site on our library commission page we have a WordPress blog embedded into a site that's run with Microsoft expression web to update it. Part of that is like the head or thing dictated by the state of Nebraska. We have things we have to do. But that center part there, that's WordPress built into something else, yeah. And both of those are actually pretty easy to work with. Yeah, I really like having you and I have because we have big talk what else do we do? I do one there really. This, well everything else was a little stuff that we don't know. Well the technology planning thing that we did, yeah the technology planning sessions that we did that's still out there. We had a Nebraska Learns 2.0 program that we did on WordPress which ended a few years ago as well I did for anyone who you guys know, I got married last year and I did my wedding website on WordPress Did you really? Yeah, why not? That's great. I bought a domain and I know WordPress from work, why the heck wouldn't I? Yes, super easy. I just did my own personal I wasn't going to say clicky but it wasn't because I spend a lot of time figuring out themes and colors and I don't even want to go into it and have my husband's input as well because it's our site but I just did that personally and yeah I think that's really one of the strongest arguments for using WordPress it's basically it's you can do whatever you want within reason, I mean we can't have some sort of animated virtual reality thing come shoot out at you or something but easily and the thing about the big talk that I was I just thought about like I said I do this once a year so once it's over like you see that my last post was in March that's pretty much it the conference is over the recordings are available there's not much else to do for it until the next year comes around on the commission site I mainly just do posts I don't do website design through it because that's not my thing I don't need to but I can come back to this in the fall again in November when I start up again and it's really easy to just pick it up I haven't been in there with moving around the pages and putting up the call for proposals one and changing to take down registration and moving all the speaker pages over and I can jump into it months later having not touched it and I still know what I'm doing yeah it doesn't change too much as I was saying the posting and sort of the basics of WordPress stays the same so you'll never really be caught off guard I'm not usually scared about going back into it again when I haven't touched it in a while yeah any questions sorry to keep asking no that's okay no nobody does anything you want to ask of Craig we've got about 10-ish minutes left officially of our hour if you want to know anything about WordPress about what the commission is doing with it anything about your sites anybody on here have let's see if you can if any of these libraries actually are using ours we have Imperial I don't know if Imperial is endless I don't know if they are I think they are Polk, Foch Memorial oh actually there it is yeah and you said Polk oh Beth just says thank you for working on fixing our page fixing Imperial I don't know if she wants to show it or not we don't have okay that's fine I know some people that some libraries have been keeping it more so we've had it's hard to keep up with everything I haven't been able to keep up to date with it but not a problem get into it when we can if anyone is considering WordPress and is not from Nebraska or somewhere remote I would recommend doing it I do think that you need to be aware of what I said before weeding, clearing out things we actually just recently went through and got rid of a bunch of our old plugins to hopefully make the site run a little faster apparently it did too we had some real slowdowns our VernRT book I was telling us that it made a difference so just like your library we need this but the benefits compared to the work that you have to put in it's definitely worth it Beth says they just haven't upgraded to the new format there's so many things to do in a day yes absolutely as Craig was saying this is our Nebraska program so this is just for Nebraska and only for public libraries that we offer it for I think the big key to it's free you don't have to pay for any hosting or server or the domain or anything do some libraries I thought there were some that they do have their own domain you said generally it's in a library that NE.gov slash your library's name but if they want to for some reason or if they already have their own domain there's a way to point their visitors to the new site excuse me my voice is breaking if they have townlibrary.com or something they can always check their hoster and point to the new page yeah so free WordPress easy lots of training if you don't already have a website through us there's more than 100 public libraries in Nebraska we've got 200 and the number is up for debate of how many and ones that come and go and what not there's a lot more out there so if you're looking for a website come to us and we can get you there for free we definitely appreciate any interest if you have any questions feel free to ask alright well nobody's typed in anything desperately they need to know right now so I assume they'll get lots of calls later I hope so thanks for having me so thank you very much Greg we haven't had anything I actually went back and looked it's been a while since we've had anything about the program on Encompass Live so I knew it was due to get people reminded about some of the things that we do here so that will wrap it up for today's show I'm going to I'll have you do this type in Encompass Live Encompass Live is online and so far and I keep saying this and some day it's going to not be true we're the only thing called that so if you Google us which is what he just did Encompass Live is what comes up first our main page and a whole bunch of other things that are all us so you can go here to see what's coming up in our schedule the show has been recorded as I said it will be available here on our live sessions page right beneath our upcoming shows and here's last week's show was from the UNO Extension and we had pretty much the same thing view recording will be here the poster recording is up to our library commission YouTube account presentation the slides will put in our slide share that we have and links which really is just the link to this program page I'll just link that here actually I think I have it in the description so you have all that information for you today or tomorrow I'll say depends on how YouTube and the different services cooperate with my need to upload them so that's where the recording will be and everyone who attended or registered today you'll get an email automatically from me letting you know that the recording is available for you so that'll be today's show I'll hope you join us for next week when our topic is binge boxes booby bags book box binge maker space kids and more it's a hard title to say I didn't write it Natalie Bizan is from who was in Michigan she's the director of both Hopkins district and Door Township libraries she's moved on to another library since then but when she's at those libraries she had this presentation about lots of kids that they have on collection I believe movie bags is movies that are made into books and you get both the book and the movie together to take home the book club kit with a whole bunch of books but it's a combo thing I think that's what that's supposed to be but she'll explain she's actually been a regular speaking of big talk from small library at least once maybe a couple of times and this is actually a session that she submitted to this year's conference but we had way too many submissions to fit into one day and I did not have the energy to do a more than one day conference run a whole thing so many of those I have invited on to Encompass Live because there's really good presentations but we only had 8 hours that we could put things in so that's what she'll be on the show next week and you can sign up for that and any of our other shows that have come up may appear and I'm working on things for June and July so as I get those confirmed they'll be added to the schedule so keep checking back Encompass Live is also on Facebook link so if you are big on Facebook it's 11 o'clock you can go over here and like our page we don't want to log in right now and you will get notifications of when shows are happening here's a reminder to log in to today's show if you wanted to posting about the upcoming shows when the recording is available so if you are big on Facebook give us a like over there and get notifications of what we're doing other than that, that wraps up for today thank you everyone for attending thank you very much Greg and we will see you double check and make sure there's no desperate no ok, questions, sorry I'm not sure I've missed some before so thank you very much and I'll see you next time on Encompass Live bye bye