Progress: Meebo and me

Early morning discussions with the boss and my IM/chat partner in crime resulted in continued progress and practice using Meebo and the Meebo Me widget and a way to move forward with the library web page redesign as we await delivery of the template. A slight web epiphany, realization that we could move forward with organization and vocabulary for sections within the editable region of the template, led me to ask if it would be appropriate for me to send email designed to promote discussion regarding main page headers and secondary sections contained within the main headers. A verbal "okay" from the boss, a promise to send the email for vetting before it goes to the team from me, and presto; a way to move forward. I asked each librarian to look at current web site headers (there are five of them) and various web sites we targeted as appealing in terms of layout/organization and use of vocabulary. Combined with the current library site map listing (updated as of 10 am this morning), use these tools to compile a list of potential main page information headers and secondary resources. We do not meet again until a week from Wednesday. This provides over ten days of rumination time. I might be able to start creating pages now and apply the template when it arrives.

Naturally I updated the webliography pages charting a history of the redesign progress; this included additional testing of the Meebo Me widget and screen shots to show the rest of the web committee how Meebo interface appears from the both the librarian and patron perspective. This meant screen shots with live users. Before starting I checked with the other chat librarian to be sure she did not want to save the visuals for our demonstration during next week's librarian meeting. We were both relatively sure chances of anyone other than us (and maybe the director) looking at the project were slim (no sarcasm intended, just a statement) and moved forward. I am going to ask her to look over the text and let me know what might need to be added.

It is exciting to get everything in place. I would still like to add one more IM service to our Meebo account, but today AIM was giving me fits. Looking this evening it appears they have done a site re-design as well and, fingers crossed, I may be able to accomplish the last objective after all.

Tomorrow after the Mock Caldecott session, I hope to work a bit on the graphics for our web site help button.

More Meebo & IM

Late Friday afternoon marked the success of adding a Meebo Me widget to my personal web site, the same place I am housing all of the web design discussion, changes, and samples. This is the perfect place for practice because the page is directly on university server space and no ftp or staging server is needed; once I hit save everything on the page is live. A short celebratory exclamation was appropriate (woo-hoo) and I contacted two other librarians, via IM, to test out the page. It was fun, informative, and we learned a few interesting things:

• If one or more patrons types in a question at the same time, simultaneous IM windows open. The person answering IM questions will do double duty.
• It helps if users close out of/leave the page featuring chat when they finish. Otherwise the next person may need to refresh or clean out their cache to open a "new" session.
• The widget does indeed make an annoying sound (it can be turned off) when the IM window is activiated and when the patron answers your query. On the plus side, this does make it easier to keep more than one window open for IM/chat.
• The active IM window is highlighted, again making it easier to distinguish when a new session is opened.
• It is possible to put up more than one widget. This will allow us to create different size feature widgets for different pages. Some pages easily facilitate larger windows while others have less available real estate for the feature.
• From a design standpoint, we were able to customize both the title of the IM/chat window on the Meebo Me widget and the colors.

After the initial thrill of "it works" wore off, we spent a few minutes conference chatting with Yahoo! Messenger discussing how the widget looked from both the user and patron end. All in all it was a very successful, and fun, afternoon. Monday I want to take time to finesse the colors and widget title some on the internal page. I also need to add text description of what widget feature entails as far as providing reference may be concerned.

With a bit of luck, the sell will not be as difficult as imagined ... one can only hope.

Playing to learn

For anyone who wondered about peer pressure ending after high school, though as adults we prefer to call it healthy competition, scrap that idea. After chatting amongst ourselves for a day, my IM co-hort in crime suddenly had an avatar pictured in her IM box. Being a visual person, it automatically caught my attention and being a tech nerd and healthily competitive, I determined I had to have one.

Yahoo! Messengar has a very cool option within their requisite email account where users can design avatars called Yahoo Avatars. Choose, dress, acessorize, and place their into IM. I spent a good half hour picking clothes, hair, eye color, accessories (glasses, scarf, and earrings), and a location for my avatar (pictured above). No, we will not be using avatars in Meebo chat. But, the more we play with the Yahoo IM/chat, the more comfortable we become in the environment. Already the merry band of chatters has increased from two to four. And after being chastized for having an avatar, I was soon contated via IM for help on how to create one (see, peer pressure - er - healthy competition, feeding off of each other's enthusiasm).

This morning I updated our progress on the web page I created for that purpose. While the chat leader invites everyone to a conference chat later this afternoon, I will be busily adding library accounts with Yahoo, Aim, and MSN in preparation for our Meebo chat test page. If we can get this much ready today, early next week we will be able to test the IM client and have not only something to report at the staff meeting, but also something to demonstrate. So, if anyone walked by my open office door today they were likely to see me working on web pages, researching academic libraries that use Meebo, and happily chatting with librarians; playing to learn.

You know what? I'm really liking my little librarian avatar and may replace my photo with her ...

Meebo, who-go?

Today's late lunch was precipitated by an impromptu meeting with the librarian in charge of exploring IM and/or Chat for the new library web page. Yesterday morning I broached my reserves about using Pidgin as a multi-client IM server for the library web page. After reading the information and doing additional research (beyond my obviously whining Pidgin poop post), it became apparent using the product in the way we desired would take someone more skilled in technology than I. This has nothing to do with product quality and everything to do with ease of use.

During this meeting, we planned to discuss several points that would need to be raised at a late afternoon staff meeting. First and foremost, there are several librarians on staff who do not know what IM is and how it could be used for possible reference applications. Our recommendation to the director is that everyone download Yahoo! Messsenger to their computers, add each other as a work buddy, and set aside a time each week to work with the software. Secondly, we reported more time would be needed for us to determine the most effective way to utilize Meebo within the library web page. We need to understand more about the software, how we plan to recommend it be used (chat or IM?), and opportunity to develope a strategy of sorts for implementation.

To begin working with IM, and eventually Meebo, I downloaded Yahoo! Messenger to my work computer and added both a friend (library director at another university)and work "buddy" to my IM list. I spent a good hour chatting with them both while getting back in to the rhythm needed to work in an IM/chat environment. A nice feature I noticed immediately with Yahoo! Messengerwas the area directly below my open IM window that noted the other person was typing. Why was that important? Prior experience with library chat had it's quirks; among them lengthy pauses between chatters (librarian and patron) that sometimes led to the eiter party typing in, "hello, are you still there?" Capability to note that the other person is writing their response is an indication to wait for an answer before entering more information and ultimately saves time.

During the meeting our update was recieved with mixed reviews; those who are very interested in exploring the situation and those who feel there is no need to incorporate more than phone numbers and email on the library help page. This is a project we need to have everyone behind for it to be successful. Two or three librarians with interest will not be able to make enough of an impact. We now have two weeks to individually strong arm the other librarians (okay, gently convince) to try the general IM client. Our next meeting will be in an instruction classroom providing us the opportunity to demonstrate usage.

More about Meebo:

• PC World: Website of the week
• PC World: The 100 Best Products of 2007 (#74)
• PC World Meebo Review

Meebo logo © Meebo

Pidgin poop

Yes, I could have tried a little harder or possibly dug a bit deeper through my endless repertoire of charming post titles and found a more subtle and nuanced caption for this entry, but after trying on four different occasions this morning and afternoon to download FAQ's and support from the Pidgin web site, my creative wordsmithing was simply cranky. A quick refresher, we are hoping to utilize instant messaging and/or chat functions within the new library web page. One of the reference librarians has been researching different venues and after a discussion late last week the tentative decision was to use Pidgin, "a multi-protocol Instant Messaging client that allows you to use all of your IM accounts at once," to facilitate the process.

To be fair, I had no problems locating the web site, following the download process, or opening the IM client. But in order to use this for the library web site, I need to be able to locate the FAQ's and developer's page with instructions on how to incorporate the widget. I admit to being a bit Monday-brain-dead and understand the software in question has many people using it and accessing the FAQ's, it was frustrating to continually be bumped off the site before a simple wiki page loaded (sorry, a bit carried away with the italics option this evening).

The boss was taking both the Pidgin and Meebo to an IT meeting this afternoon for input regarding our tentative decision for a multi-tasking IM client. Tomorrow might bring a different software selection.

On another note, logging in this evening I noticed this is post number 499! Good thing I didn't title post number 500 with poop.

Note: Pigeon logo © Pidgin.im