L&LR staff blog

Joss has beaten me to blogging this, so rather than think for myself I’m just going to quote him in full.

Yesterday, I submitted a proposal to Talis under their Incubator fund. If successful, I would have the pleasure of working with Paul Stainthorp, E-Resources Librarian at the University of Lincoln, and Casey Bisson,  Information Architect at Plymouth State University. The bid is to develop an idea which I’ve posted about before, based on Casey’s work on Scriblio and our adventures with WordPress MU, in particular, JISCPress.

Anyway, rather than re-iterating the bid here. You can read it in full by clicking here.

Comments are very welcome. Thanks.

I’m at Birmingham City University on Monday for mashed library event No.3, a.k.a. #Middlemash.

I’m giving a lightning talk in the morning covering the work we’ve done on using RefWorks to create new-book RSS feeds; I’ll also be trying to raise interest around Joss’s and my project to develop Wordpress MU as a platform for a devolved union catalogue.

You can follow Monday’s discussions on Twitter, if you’re so inclined (hashtag #middlemash).

Joss Winn has blogged about a possible next stage in developing our idea of using WordPress MU+Scriblio+Triplify to create a flexible, devolved ‘union-catalogue-lite‘ Web2.0-age OPAC ecosystem. It’s going to require funding, and clearer thinking.

Our lightning presentation received a muted response at Mash Oop North, but I’m sure that there’s a corker of an idea in here somewhere. Over to Joss:

“Imagine that JISC, Talis or Eduserv offered such a platform to UK university libraries. It could be a service, not unlike wordpress.com, where authorised institutions, could self-register for a site and easily import their OPAC, apply a theme, tweak some CSS, choose from a few useful plugins, and within less than a day or two, have a branded, cutting-edge search and browse interface to their OPAC, running under their own domain.”

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 Please note that your old password for the blogs is no longer valid – also that the web address to log in and post to the blogs has changed.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…

~~~~~~

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.

I’ve just upgraded our installation of Wordpress MU for Blogs·Library·Lincoln to the latest version, 2.6.3.

And nearly broken the blogs in the process.

Note my use of the word ‘nearly’!

You’ll notice that I’ve changed the visual theme of this L&LR staff blog from the Wordpress ‘default’ theme to a different, minimalist theme called ‘blog.txt‘.

I’ve only done this because people were getting confused about which blog they were posting to(!) – so the change is just intended to distinguish between this blog, and the public, L&LR news blog, which uses the default theme. (The Winch, the researchers’ current awareness blog, uses a different theme called ‘Cutline’, with some alterations that we’ve made ourselves.)

I’m not suggesting that this theme should be the theme we use for the L&LR staff blog for ever more… I’d very much like some suggestions as to a better theme.

You can search thousands of Wordpress themes, at: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

And once we’ve installed a theme we like, we can make as many little tweaks to the colour, fonts, design & layout as we like.

Any volunteers?

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