About:
I'm in my mid-twenties, London based and a honking great nerd. I used to be a programmer and a web dev and the Benevolent Dictator of a University IT Lab but now I'm a librarian. I spent the last couple years in the commercial sector, specifically law and when I wasn't herding cats lawyers cats, I was an active member of the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians' Web Board where among other things, I wrote policy (for my sins) and acted as a liaison to other committees/groups. We launched our major project, which was a complete overhaul of the website shortly before I left the sector. We dragging it, kicking and screaming, into the Century of the Anchovy.
What I do now is an enjoyable mixture of my previous lives and libraries; I work for the King's Fund as their Assistant Electronic Services Librarian, which means I deal with the technical side of the library, write and maintain various databases, front-ends and other such beasts - some of which you can find on the project page - and generally geek out a lot.
My arm is famous on the internet - I have a Neil Gaiman related tattoo that turns up everywhere, including Neil's twitter. It makes me laugh a lot because, hey, what else do you do when your arm is famous on the internet?
I'm fairly vocal about the use of IT, Open Source Software and Social Media in libraries/library related areas and I've been blogging on and off for the last ten or so years. I hold a degree in Web Content Management as well as one in Library and Information Science. My Bachelors dissertation was on how an online subculture (i.e. Fandom) uses the Internet as an archiving tool and my Masters thesis is on how the same community uses social bookmarking/folksonomies as an OPAC/catagorisation system. You can find more on that under projects as well.
This Site
I've had this domain for just short of ten years. It's been various things but almost always my general base on the internets. Views expressed here are mine and not those of my employers.
Right now, it's powered by old skool methods with hand written code (NoteTab and Topstyle) and ye good old fashioned ftp, which is actually how it pretty much started out. It's been powered by Blogger, Greymatter, Wordpress and a brief flirtation with a homebrew PHP content management system, which actually worked quite well until I resoundingly FUBAR'd the code. Heh. Shiny, new fangled techie bits are mostly powered by Flickr, Last.fm and Tumblr.
I design for browsers that actually render, so Firefox or Chrome. It will degrade nicely if you must use IE.
I am mostly powered by tea. And gin.
Photographs are taken with a Canon Ixus 75 and futzed with in Photoshop or, if I'm particularly lazy, Pisca, although I do also use an LC-A but have a backlog of film to get developed. They're all creative commons licensed but check the individual images because some are under a stricter license than the rest.
Feel free to say hello!
© Meg Jones. 2000 - 2009.