L&LR staff blog

For more than a year, I’ve been meaning to resurrect my website of tips & tricks for reference management. I finally got around to doing so today, with a new video tutorial about sending references to a RefWorks account from the University of Lincoln Repository. You can see it at – http://refworks.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/ Last July, inspired [...]

Joss has explained to me that your name is stored within these blogs in 2 separate places: In your profile in BuddyPress – the ‘social networking’ glue which holds all the blogs together; And also within the blog-writing admin interface itself. In both of these places, the default for your name is your University username [...]

The more observant amongst you will have spotted that the visual theme of this blog (which used a WordPress theme called “BLOG.TXT“) has changed. Unfortunately the old theme wasn’t displaying properly since the move to the new blogging platform. This new theme is called “Journalist“. So, we mourn for you, BLOG.TXT, for you are no [...]

F.A.O. all staff in L&LR at the University of Lincoln. I’ve ‘pushed the button’ on quite a big change for the way L&LR staff post new messages to our three blogs. The main result of the change is that we’ve been brought within the main University blogging platform. Our old blogging interface [image below] is [...]

As part of the PAL project, I’d like us to produce a style guide of sorts for Blogs·Library·Lincoln – something along the lines of this one, and expanding on these posts. Any takers? Incidentally, the PAL student advisers will all have accounts on the public, news blog, with their posts gathered together at: http://blogs.library.lincoln.ac.uk/news/category/student-advisers/feed/

A few people have asked if we can (and whether we should) set up individual subject-specific blogs. The thing is, we’ve already got ‘em (kind of): Architecture Art & Design Forensic Science Humanities Journalism Law Performing Arts Policy Studies Psychology Social Work Each link is a separate RSS feed of postings to the main L&LR [...]

This is more of a departmental guideline than a tip… and it applies when writing for the Portal, Blackboard, etc., as well as for the blogs. Try and remember the other 3 campuses! If you’re writing for a Brayford audience about something which only applies to Lincoln, then make it clear in the story (and [...]

If you paste text into WordPress from Microsoft Word (or Excel, PowerPoint, FrontPage etc.) using the usual cut-and-paste shortcuts (right-click > Paste or Ctrl > V), it can lead to some odd-looking blog posts. This is because WordPress will keep the formatting that Microsoft Word used, even if it doesn’t match the rest of the [...]

When you write a blog post, you can enter any number of tags. You’ll see the ‘Add new tag’ field underneath the main ‘Post’ window. Tags are a really useful way of informally grouping together several blog postings covering the same subject(s), using [usually] one- or two-keyword phrases, so that readers of your blog can quickly view a [...]

Joss introduced me to Yammer today… it’s a ‘microblogging’ service, similar to Twitter or the Facebook ‘status update’, but designed for work – it looks like an interesting way for groups of dispersed colleagues to keep in touch with what the others are up to in a non-threatening way! There’s a small (6 users!) but [...]