Yes, I'm still alive and doing fairly well, but I've been really busy lately. Today the new SLS home page went live. The good news is that it's a Movable Type blog and you can subscribe to our news! We think that the new design will make it easier for our members to find things, as well as facilitate communication and disseminate current news. I'm pretty excited about that end of it. Although I won't be blogging items on the page, others in the organization will, especially Merri Monks. She's already addicted to blogging, and I think she'll post some really great content so I'm subscribing to our home page myself!

Just a few good things about the new page: drop-down menus for one-click access to resources, a "suggestion box" to make it even easier to comment or ask questions, and links to youth services resources (which were kind of buried in the old scheme). I even linked to LISFeeds on the home page, and if I can find a usable logo, I'm going to add a link to the Illinois Library Systems site.  :-)

The bad news is that it's a temporary page, a band-aid actually, until we get the software from our current grant project (NEWS - News Exchange Web Service) up and running. It's being written even as you read this, and the major foundation will be blogging and RSS. I guess that's actually more good news but to get back to the bad news, the home page and resulting news archive are really the only pages that will be converted to the new look, at least for now. So the rest of the pages still look like our old design. Patience, grasshopper, and all will be changed in the new system.

It is exciting, though, to be the first Library System in Illinois to be running a blog front and center with accompanying RSS feed!