I designed my first website in 1997. I use the word designed lightly, as it was full of gaudy background images—and at least one animated graphic on each page! I was so proud of that site, as I’m sure many of us were when we created our first. However, times have changed, and the tools have gotten so much better.

That first website was a hint into my future: It was a collection of all of my bookmarks organized into categories for easy browsing. (Sound like a future librarian to you?) I created a resource that my friends and family used when they needed to find information online. After years of maintaining this website with only simple HTML, I became frustrated by the lack of an easy way to keep things up-to-date and abandoned it.

It took more than 10 years, but the day is finally here when I can re-create that website (without the flashy images and gaudy back- ground, of course) and easily maintain a collection of useful links with my friends, family, and colleagues. That website is the companion to this book, found at mashups.web2learning.net. It was created using a simple mashup of my Delicious bookmarks (www.delicious. com/librarymashups) and a WordPress (www.wordpress.org) blog—a method I learned from reading a chapter in this book.

Mashups (as many of the contributors to this title will tell you) are web applications that use content from more than one source to create a single new service, displayed in a single graphical interface. This means that I can bookmark all of the links found in this book and share them with you on my WordPress-powered website with minimal effort. In fact, I just had to check a few boxes on a form and then copy and paste a snippet of code.