Congratulations Casey!

Contrary to any speculation you might see on snopes.com, I haven’t been abducted by aliens, joined a monastery, or fallen down an open manhole cover — the last couple of months have been fairly hectic and although I’ve kept saying to myself “I must remember to blog about XYZ”, life just keeps throwing stuff in my way.
Anyway, this morning I found out that Casey Durfee has left the Seattle Public Library to become the latest employee of LibraryThing — specifically he’s going to be working on the LibraryThing for Libraries product.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve added something to our OPAC or written a bit of code that I thought was new & cool only to find out that Mr Durfee had already done it.
I think I’m already on record as saying that if I lived in the USA, I’d camp outside Tim Spalding’s house with a large sign saying “Please let me work for LibraryThing! Will write code for coffee and peanuts!”. Come the day that LibraryThingGlobalHyperMegaCorpLtd opens its first UK office, I’ll be there with my sign.
So, with a huge amount of envy, I’d like to wish Casey all the best in his new job. I’d also like to thank him for the hundreds of helpful emails he’s sent to the IPAC and Horizon mailing lists over the last 6 years — there were many times when I seriously wondered if Casey knew more about how HIP worked than the developers at Dynix (and then SirsiDynix) did!

More Solr fun

Darn, I should have known I was following in a great man’s footsteps…
http://www.code4lib.org/2007/durfee
Anyway, a couple more hours of coding has resulted in this…
http://161.112.232.18/modperl/facet6.pl?q=medicine
solr5
Hopefully NCSU won’t be setting their lawyers on me (copying is the most sincere form of flattery!), but the prototype has certainly borrowed one or two ideas from their wonderful OPAC.
It’s still a way off being a full OPAC replacement and I need to shrink the book covers down to a more sensible size, but I’m quite chuffed with what I’ve been able to achieve in just a few hours of coding.