L&LR staff blog

Always wanted to write a blog post but forgot how to get to it?

There is now a new link from the Portal staff pages which takes you straight to the log in page.

Go to https://portal.lincoln.ac.uk/C19/C15/LLRStaffPages/default.aspx

I think Daren’s latest versions of his Portal subject pages look very good – nice and simple.

• CERD
• Computing
• Journalism

If anyone is updating their page(s) this summer and would like to go for this new template, let me know.

The off-campus licence code for using SPSS 14 at home… is now on the Portal:

• https://portal.lincoln.ac.uk/C11/C14/SPSScode/

I’ve done this (at Oonagh’s request) so that we’ve a way of referring students to the code without passing it over email (unsecure). It gets updated every year, apparently.

Like this:

Step 1. Search for the student (by name or Account ID) using the “People” search in the top right hand corner of the Portal:

Step 2. When you’ve found the right student in the list of Portal search results, click on their name to view their public MySite. This displays their award code (labelled “Job Ref. No.:“)…

Step 3. Copy the award code, and paste it into a Group Lookup search. You can get to the Group Lookup from the front page of the Portal, or directly at: https://portal.lincoln.ac.uk/C14/C7/grouplookup/

The Group Lookup search results will show you the full name of the award.

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

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