Blog Evangelist

People have said such nice things about my blog - my kids at work, my fellow librarian at work, (who is also my friend, Kathe, and who TOTALLY needs a blog since she's a great writer and an amazing pop culture expert - you should have seen her expounding upon why Kirk Cameron is evil today), and my classmates and blog teacher - yeah! I'm impressed at how versatile and easy it is to do this. I was experimenting with using the remote email address to post a blog and I did hit some snags - I use FirstClass at work which is an email client for schools and it looked like it inserted a hinky html tag that made my formatting a little wanky and when I went to fix it, the post came up blank even though text was there - I'm going to have to experiment with that and get a sense of learning the html tags just to familiarize myself and head off any problems.

My students thought the blog looked great until I showed them some of the cool templates available at francey.org and then they started Jonesing for all the really spiffy ones. I'm definitely looking forward to thinking about creating a customized template that has everything I want in a blog with a good look that appeals to the kids (they seem to really love the retro look of the 40s and 50s). So far here's what I like about the blogs I've seen and my checklist for a revamped library website:

1. I want all my current pages on my website formatted with the headbar and navigation features of the blog template (I'm assuming this is basically a CSS?).
2. A calendar feature at the top (convenient for post navigation and quite honestly, handy to remember what day of the week it is!).
3. The ability for students and faculty to set up a username and password so they can contribute to the blog (like for book review pages) and I approve the posts before they go up.
4. Pictures of book covers and fun photos of our library programming (like movie marathons - all 5 Star Wars movies on the 14th - and our Poetry Slams).
5. An upper navigation bar with clean rollovers thus freeing up my left hand navigation buttons on the current website, particularly all the areas I haven't developed yet because I didn't have the time (now a moot point as blog librarian).
6. Can I have feeds from This Day in History and The New York Times that put headlines on the blog page, to keep my current events junkies interested?
7. A "search this site" feature and a Google search bar (with lots of nearby links to Boolean searching techniques and electronic databases, natch).
8. A nifty "contact us" interface that makes people want to contact us - with nice things to say!

I hope I can get everything - the kids would love it and I'd look like a web goddess to the teachers (little do they know how easy it is!).