Say you're starting a blog for your liaison area and you want something free, quick and dirty and easy so you can connect to your students, faculty, staff, etc. I know about the biggies: wordpress, tumblr, blogspot...are there others? Which do you go with and why? Thanks in advance.
Scoble, Alex Scoble,
John (bird whisperer),
LibrarianOnTheLoose,
Shevonne,
Sir Shuping is just sir,
and
RepoRat
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Check to see if your campus computing sponsors anything. Ours specifically supports Wordpress and we have shibboleth authentication on all of our library blogs, which is handy. I use Wordpress and Blogspot for my own stuff;I find Wordpress easier to customize.
- Hedgehog
The easiest to use will be whatever AU has installed, as Ms. Hedgehog said. If they don't have anything in place, my next suggestion would be Wordpress simply because if you have a question there is a HUGE community of librarians using it every day who can help.
- WebGoddess
I really like Wordpress, specifically because it offers so many ways to push or pull the content as the users want.
- RudĩϐЯaЯïan
I might pick Tumblr (or even Twitter) if most of what you're doing is linkblogging. Otherwise, I concur that Wordpress is probably top drawer. Also, check whether the library has any social-media policies or procedures you need to follow. This is a case where permission might be a good idea because forgiveness may not be forthcoming.
- RepoRat
1) Whatever works for your IT; if the answer is none, then WP or Tumblr. Depends on what you want to do but they can both do what you need if you have a quick and dirty need for info sharing.
- ♫Maurice the Dolphin♫
bevedog brings up a good point: where at are your students, faculty, and staff? Go there if possible.
- RepoRat
I also follow the twitter chatter about the library. I have saved searches on steacie, steacielibrary, yorku library etc.
- John Dupuis
I've used weebly to create a couple of sites this summer and found it very easy to pick up and they look great! There's not as many options as you get with wordpress etc but I found that a good thing as it kept the whole thing much simpler and therefore less time consuming.
- Heleninstitches #teamff
I think I'll poke around and see if there's anything supported by the university and use that as my first option, but other than that, think something like WP or Blogspot will work. I've noticed since posting this that our Media Library has a blog and it's pretty close in idea to what I'd like to do with our School of Communication. Thanks!
- Derrick
I'll just note I've been having terrible problems with spam on Blogspot recently. It seems not to publish them but I still get email notifications for each one that I can't readily distinguish from email notifications for comments that haven't been published. YMMV.
- Deborah Fitchett
Also find out what they explicitly *don't* support. At MPOW tumblr is blocked b/c it's "social media" (of course, twitter and facebook are allowed ... go figure!)
- henry
The library has a wordpress account/affiliation! Good to know and will be moving forward. Thanks again everyone.
- Derrick