I had some advance warning that today was going to be long. I thought it might be interesting to actually document a day in the life of a webmaster. I think many people see it as glamorous, but I've always thought of it as very much a detail-oriented job. A webmaster, if they're doing their job correctly, spends a lot of his/her day chasing down details. Making sure everything's posted, everything's right, everyone's notified and everyone's on the same page.

This is a day in the life of a webmaster who is trying to prepare her library's website for summer reading.

Tally as of 10:30 a.m.:

There is nothing left to do, and little left to say. Three years' worth of work culminates in this, a five-day span in which I will work harder at something than most people would ever dream of calling 'fun.'This database has grown beyond what any of our predictive abilities believed it might become. We expected a flat, two-dimensional set of data: names, addresses, phone numbers. What it became, though, was a central point around which everything else revolved. A repository.

There.As of a few minutes ago, the 2006 shift signup grid was just distributed to tech. Thus ends phase 1 of the Busy Season, and begins the mad rush of Phase 2. Today—the shift grid release day—is the day that I work for months toward, knowing that the moment these grids are released, I am not likely to have time to work on anything else.

"I'll have a little from Column A and a little from Column B, please."

Short, cryptic, and marginally observational snippets from life in the past week:

The hallmarks of change have been there for some time: the favicon switching to an inexplicable light blue, the folder marked 'domesticat idea' in the 'design work' folder. Those of you using feedreaders this weekend might've noticed cat.net posts appearing multiple times in your feedreader as I re-jiggered the feeds to pass through some very basic markup that I've been using for months now.Add to that the sudden uptick in posts recently, and you might begin to suspect that something's up. You'd be right.