This is the UK Web Focus blog, written by Brian Kelly, UKOLN. UKOLN is a national centre of expertise in digital information management, based at the University of Bath. UKOLN is funded by the JISC.
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Posted by Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) on 9 January 2007
Following my recent comments on the TASI Lightbox blog I noticed an incoming link from the JISC involve blog. A posting giving a number of links to resources contained an announcement of the OSS Watch team blog. The first posting to the blog was made just before Christmas and OSS Watch team members have begun posting to the blog since the start of the new year.
I think we can expect to see greater use of blogging tools across JISC and JISC Services this year, and possibly blogs set up to support JISC-funded development projects.
It might be useful, therefore, to explore some best practises across this development environment, including issues such as selection of software; purposes of the service; policies covering use of such services; interoperability and searching across related blog services; maximising impact and measuring success.
I wonder if much work has been carried out in this area? Have there been, for example, reports and studies on use of blogs across IT development programmes in other countries?
Matt Jukes said
The platform that the OSS Watch blog is running on (and the Users and Innovation programme blog – http://involve.jisc.ac.uk/u-and-i plus one or two more about to be launched) is very much a beta service but its aim is to allow any JISC Service or programme a blog – currently its not really going as far as projects (as there is no real person resource other than me). The choice of WordPress MultiUser was made based on the fact it was free, stable and used in similar situations (especially EduBlogs in Australia) and in the East Lothian schools project. I’m interested in any research around the areas you’ve mentioned Brain as well..
Alastair Dunning said
The AHDS is currently experimenting with WordPress and hopes to have a blog up and running in February 2007. Actually it’s up and running at the moment, but it is currently blocked by institutional firewalls! Getting somebody to sign the right forms is a pain in the neck.
One issue I’ve not got my head round yet is how to tailor RSS feeds so that they can be embedded into other areas of a website. In particular I want to use RSS feeds to create headlines on the website front page and as news items on the website news page. I’ve used UKOLN’s RSS express but that gives a rather plain style which is at odds with the website style. Any useful pointers?
Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) said
UKOLN’s RSSxpress-Lite service can do this. This uses JavaScript to pull in the RSS feeds and convert it to HTML. The items have specified span attributes, allowing you to use CSS styles to render the items as you see fit.
You can see an example of this on the news page for the Exploiting The Potential Of Wikis workshop – if you vuiew the source you’ll see the Javascript used to pull in and render the RSS feed.
Note there are lots of such tools available. Another one I’ve come across is RSS-info – which allows the conversion to be carried out using PHP, IFRAMES as well as JavaScript.
Phil Wilson said
I meant to email you about this yesterday actually, but RSSxpress doesn’t work with Atom.
Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) said
Hi Phil – we’ll be looking at developments to RSSXpress sometime in the near future. Support for Atom is clearly one area we need to look at
Michael Fraser said
Hi Brian,
Intute Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences and Science/Engineering maintain blogs (using WordPress).
One reason we like WordPress is for the access levels it provides. We (Arts and Humanities) are about to give accounts to our distributed subject reviewers, for example, rather than restricting entries to central staff.
Mike
Alastair Dunning said
Okay, I’ve managed import a blog feed into a website – very useful for creating news items – using rss express (http://ahds.ac.uk/news/). But how do you make sure there is a date accompanying the headline using RSS express? I presume this is the technology behind the UKOLN home page
Alastair