L&LR staff blog

Joss has explained to me that your name is stored within these blogs in 2 separate places:

1. In your profile in BuddyPress – the ’social networking’ glue which holds all the blogs together;
2. And also within the blog-writing admin interface itself.

In both of these places, the default for your name is your University username (e.g. dbeckham, or, if you’re a student, 06543210). You can replace this default with your real name (or an alias…), but unfortunately…

…you have to change it in BOTH PLACES in the blogging environment.

To update your name in both places, you first need to go to your BuddyPress profile – log in to blogs.lincoln.ac.uk and go to My Account > Profile > Edit Profile.

Edit your full name, scroll down, and hit ‘Save Changes’.

Here you can also add an avatar (picture) to your profile (it doesn’t have to be the standard ‘mugshot’ picture – you could use a graphic which represents your work in L&LR, a picture of your cat; whatever), and fill out the other details of your profile, if you want to do so.

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Then, go to your (entirely separate) profile within any of our individual blogs (for example, the L&LR staff blog) – here’s a direct link:

• http://librarystaff.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/wp-admin/profile.php

Or, you can get to it by going to My Blogs > L&LR Staff Blog > Dashboard, then by scrolling down and clicking on the link to ‘Your Profile’.

This gives you a whole load of options to change the way your name actually displays in your blog posts. When you’re happy with this bit, scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on ‘Update Profile’.

That’s it!

It’s unfortunate that you have to enter this information twice, but it only takes 2 minutes and it does give you the perfect excuse to fill in all your profile details :-)

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 more. That theme (and this new one, for that matter) was only ever intended to be a temporary ‘look’ until we found a theme we preferred. If anyone has a favourite WordPress theme they’d like to use on the L&LR staff blog, let me know and we’ll give it a whirl.

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 now defunct.

The old, now-defunct blogging interface.

And here's the look of the new platform.

This post explains [below] how you can get started using the new platform. Please note that your old password for the blogs is no longer valid – also that the web address to log in and post to the blogs has changed.

But first – why the change?

• The new platform offers the potential for building a much greater readership of our blogs. It plugs in to other blogging activity going on at Lincoln and brings us closer to the centre of the University.
• We benefit from the social-networking aspects of the “BuddyPress” extension to WordPress blogging software which forms part of the new platform. BuddyPress has been described as “a Facebook for the University of Lincoln” – a description which may excite or depress you! :-)
• The new blogging platform is based on a newer, updated version of WordPress software, with more powerful features, and which is hopefully easier to use.
• Because it uses the same installation of WordPress blogging software as all other University blogs, there’s no need for us (me!) to manage the software separately – that’s less work to do, and fewer add-ons and user accounts to keep up to date.
• The new platform is attached to your standard University account, so you don’t need a separate password any more. One less to remember…

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Here’s what you’ll need to do to start using the new blogging interface:

1. Go to the following address (and save it in your bookmarks – N.B. this link replaces the previous login link):
   • http://blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/
2. You’ll see the login page. Log in with your normal, University username and password (don’t use any passwords you’ve used for the blogs until now – they’re history!)
3. Hit ‘log in’. You’ll see the message “There is a problem with this website’s security certificate“. Click on “Continue to this website”. (This message will disappear, in time).
4. Using the toolbar at the top of the page, highlight “My Blogs”. A drop-down menu will appear.
   
5. Highlight the name of the L&LR blog you want to post to (at the minute, we’re running three blogs). If you can’t see the blog to which you want to post, please let me know and I’ll give you the correct rights.
6. Then click on “New Post”.
7. This will take you to the author’s interface for the blog you selected – equivalent, but different, to the admin interface on the ‘old’ Blogs·Library·Lincoln platform.
8. Don’t forget to add tags to the post you’re creating, to insert images as appropriate, and to follow these blogging tips.
9. Any questions? Please ask me for help, or take a look at the “New here? Read this…” message on the new blogging home page.
10. It’s also worth taking 5 minutes to update your Profile (under ‘My Account’ at the top of the page). You can add a photo / image, change your profile name (from e.g. “dbeckham” to “Dave B.” or “David Beckham (Football Librarian)” – however you want your name to appear on your blog postings in future, and add additional information about you & your work within the University.
    

That’s it! I still need to do some work with C.E.R.D. to ensure that traffic to our blogs is being directed to the correct address [and also to close down our old blogging software], but our readers can continue to access our blogs in the way they’ve always done (directly on the Web at blogs.library.lincoln.ac.uk, via RSS feed, email subscription, or through the in-page feeds on the University website and the Portal), but we get the benefits of being part of the much wider University blogging community that’s being built up at blogs.lincoln.ac.uk.

Again – any questions about the change, please talk to me!

Paul S.

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 news blog, filtered down to only those posts which have been tagged with the name of a subject. Any new posts you add with the same subject tag will show up in the feed. And you can create a new subject feed by writing a post and creating a new subject tag.

These feeds could then by displayed in (e.g.) Blackboard using a tool like feed2js.org, which renders the RSS as JavaScript code (which you can then paste into an item in a Bb folder).

And if we ever wanted to have entirely separate subject blogs in the future, we could just convert the tag-specific feed into a separate named blog. Semantically there’s no difference in WordPress between a blog, a category, and a tag.

Paul

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 by using tags) that it’s a GCW-specific story.

It’s equally a good idea to clearly signpost when it’s a Hull-, Riseholme- or Holbeach-specific blog posting – and, conversely, to explicitly say when a story applies across all campuses and L&LR centres.

This allows users to filter our blogs’ RSS feeds, if they want, so that they’re not getting stories which only relate to centres they don’t use. And it helps avoid any “misunderstandings”!

There’s more on this in the [still draft!] bloggers’ guidelines.

Paul

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 blog and looks totally out of place. Like these first two paragraphs, written in Word using Times New Roman.

Wordpress provides a tool specifically for pasting text in from Word which gets around this problem. You’ll find it in the ‘Post’ window text editor when you write a blog posting, under the “kitchen sink” – that’s the odd little icon to the right of the text editor, which opens up a list of additional formatting buttons (everything but the kitc… aah, you get it).

The ‘Paste from Word’ button is in the middle of the list of additional formatting buttons. If you use that button instead of Ctrl > V, it’ll paste the text in to your blog posting, but strip out Word’s formatting.

[click for bigger picture]

It’s a useful way of keeping your blog postings looking tidy, even if you’re pasting text in from other sources.

Paul

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 list of entries which relate to the one they’re currently reading.

When you start to type in the ‘Add new tag’ box, Wordpress will give you suggestions from its database of existing tags. If you click on one of Wordpress’ suggestions, then hit ‘Add’, your posting will be tagged with that word. You can add as many tags as you like to this box, separated by commas.

Popular tags are displayed on the front page of the blog in a Tag Cloud – kind of a ‘what’s hot on this blog’ feature. The size of the text in the tag cloud relates to the number of stories tagged with that word or phrase.

Allowing a large number of users to tag stories on a web site, and using the “wisdom of the crowd” to create a useful, democratic, non-hierarchical keyword structure, is often known as folksonomy – from folk+taxonomy.

Yes, all very Web2.0.

Please do go ahead and add tags to your own blog postings – they really add to the usefulness of the blog as a living repository of information about L&LR.

Some useful links from the ever-useful Wikipedia (yes-I-use-it-but-don’t-tell-the-students):

• Tag (Wikipedia)
• Tag cloud (Wikipedia)
• Folksonomy (Wikipedia)
• Tags and tag clouds (LibraryStream)
• Tag clouds (Stephen Abram’s blog)
• Live cloud of subject terms in Horizon (University of Huddersfield)

Paul

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 growing University of Lincoln presence.

• Web address: http://www.yammer.com/

Paul

I’ve added a ‘recent posts’ RSS feed for our general news blog to the Blackboard ‘Library’ tab, and to our home page on the Portal.

The Blackboard feed is done using a built-in “Channel” feature, which is unfortunately only available to administrators.

I created the feed on the Portal using a SharePoint Virtual Server Web Part provided by timheuer.com… you can use this tool yourself to add RSS feeds to any Portal site (Edit Page > Modify Shared Page > Add Web Parts > Browse > Virtual Server Gallery > RSS FeedReader).

The next step is to get the feed onto the main University web site.

Paul