Blogging: the three main options and platforms for hosting a blog

The issue of where to host a blog is fairly complicated for people new to the medium - particularly the differences between wordpress.org and wordpress.com. I often have to write a condensed version of the advice below in emails to people as follow-ups to blogging workshops, so I thought I'd put it all in one blog post in case others find it useful too.

Why does the platform matter?

Every blogging option comes with its own advantages and drawbacks. On a basic level they run on a sliding scale from quick, logistically easy, and ugly / annoying to use at one end, to more complicated, faffy, and nice to look at / simple to use at the other. Often the more basic solution starts off okay and then becomes problematic later on, but you can migrate blogs to new platforms without too much fuss, so if you set up a wordpress.com blog on a whim and it turned into something significant and valuable, so now you want to upgrade to wordpress.org to get rid the weight-loss ads which have started appearing on your posts, then fear not, you can do exactly that.

All blogging platforms have some things in common. They all have a basic word processor interface for typing in posts, they all give you stats on how many people are reading your posts, they all give you ready-made options to help readers subscribe to, search, and share what you're blogging. All allow you to pay for a URL and so call your site the slightly more credible-looking yourname.com rather than yourname.wordpress.com or similar.

You could show all of them to someone in the year 2000 and their jaw would drop open at the sheer POWER and SIMPLICITY of what you can do in 2014 FOR FREE and with no knowledge of code / building websites. They're ace. They're an opportunity.

I have not included Typepad in this list because it's a paid for service - it's very good but, having tried it out, I don't believe it represents the kind of step up from the free options below which would warrant a monthly cash investment.

Blogger

Blogger.com is a Google product. It is sometimes frustrating and pernickety to use, and is the least aesthetically pleasing option. It looks dated, both to the author and the reader. However, it is free - and at the time of writing, you get no adverts on your blog posts unless you choose to put them there yourself.

Setting up a Blogger account is the most straightforward - if you have a Google account, you effectively have a Blogger account whether you've made use of it or not. Just go to blogger.com, log-in, and click create blog (further instructions here). I use Blogger to power my Library Marketing Toolkit website - I chose it because it is free, doesn't require the logistical hassle of self-hosting, and won't display unwanted ads. It took ages of tinkering to make the site look relatively nice though, and it still looks pretty 90s.

Blogger is quickish, powerful and a relatively straightforward way to build a website - you don't HAVE to use it as a blog, even. 10 years ago this would be the greatest most useful thing ever - it's only because there are easier and more attractive options now that we don't now celebrate its glory.

I recommend Blogger to people who are dipping their toe into blogging but aren't yet sure it'll be a major part of their professional lives, and who need the credibility that comes with not having ads. If you don't mind the potential ads on your posts, then option two, wordpress.com, is a better bet.

Wordpress.com

Wordpress.com is, like Blogger, free and easy to use. Wordpress hosts the blog for you, so there's no need to self-host the website. Compared to Blogger, it is basically easier to use, less frustrating, more flexible, more fresh and modern and nice looking, and great.

The only major downside is that after a certain popularity threshold (I'm afraid I've not been able to pin down exactly where this threshold is) you get ads on your posts, which you can't control or turn off. As I say, if this isn't a problem for you, go for this option, it's great. A second more minor downside compared to Blogger: at the moment you can't use Google analytics with it, and there are occasional issues around embedding dynamic content.

I used wordpress.com to power the Buy India a Library site - it was ridiculously simple to create that, literally in less than an hour, and without needing any knowledge of HTML etc. I also used it for my band's website, below - again, this took a tiny amount of time considering it looks nice and works well.

Wordpress.org

In many ways wordpress.org is the gold standard option - it affords the most flexibility and the most control. You can set your site up any way you like using a greater number of free themes, or by paying for a 'premium' theme, or by designing your own - this thewikiman site is a wordpress.org blog, with a theme I created, writing the HTML.

Two other things there are much more of with wordpress.org than with .com or Blogger are analytics - you can get hugely detailed statistics about who is visiting your site, for how long, when they're from, what makes them leave and so on- and plugins, which is to say the little widgets which appear in the column down the right-hand side. Whether it's Twitter and Facebook sharing buttons, or embedding a Twitter feed or YouTube account, or being able to print these posts to PDF, or displaying the most commented upon posts - all of these are plugins which I didn't create myself, but which already existed and I just applied them to this blog. And you never get ads, or indeed anything, placed on your blog, which you don't put there yourself.

There is only one downside: HASSLE. It is a hassle to use wordpress.org because it is 'self-hosted'. So while Blogger and Wordpress.com blogs sit on the blogger.com and wordpress.com sites without you having to do anything, you need a host server for a wordpress.org blog, onto which you have to install wordpress software. It is possible to find free hosting, but it will put so many limitations on its not worth having - so that means paying for hosting, and paying for the domain name. In my case it's £96 per year for the hosting, and £20 for the domain name. I used to have a cheaper hosting package, but I used up all the bandwidth before the end of each month (due to the amount of people visiting this site) so had to upgrade - although now I hardly blog anymore, I should probably look at going back to a cheaper package.

Wordpress recommends these hosting companies, but personally I recommend Clook very highly indeed. Great service, good prices, wordpress.org can be installed automatically without any technical know-how, and the tech support is completely fabulous. I once tweeted in passing about how my blog was down due to server maintenance, and Clook saw the tweet, looked into it, saw there was a problem with my blog specifically, fixed it, and THEN tweeted me back to say it was sorted! All without asking me any questions or telling me to stand by while they investigated; I hadn't even logged a request with technical support online or actually solicited their assistance. They're ace.

The other hassle is maintenance. Wordpress.com blogs get everything taken care of by Wordpress - the .org version you have to upkeep yourself, installing updates (which is a simple, automatic process) of both the software itself and your plugins.

In my view all of this is worth it for this, my main site - but not for any other projects I'm involved with thus far. If you don't mind the fact that you have to be more proactive in set-up and maintenance, and can afford hosting, it's the best option by far, in my view.

(Bonus option: Tumblr)

Tumblr began as a short-form blogging platform, somewhere between a traditional blog and the instant communication of Twitter. People can use it however they want, but personally I think you need to be on Tumblr for a reason - it's not a direct equivalent to the options listed above, but something a little different. (The BL's mechanical curator is my favourite reason for a tumblr so far...)

Tumblr is a self-contained community in the way the others are not. There is a ready-made group of people for you to join in with, and by far the fastest growing group of users - because it massively popular with a younger demographic, Tumblr continues to grow incredibly rapidly. But you need a Tumblr account to comment on a Tumblr post, so it's not the ideal medium for reaching and interacting with as wide a group of people as possible. By all means set up a Tumblr if you have something offbeat which suits the 'brief and often' nature of the medium, but if you're setting up, for example, an academic blog, I would recommend choosing wordpress or blogger.

So! There you go. I hope someone finds this helpful. Any questions, leave me a comment.

Good luck.

Twitter tips for improvers

Here's a new set of slides I've just uploaded to my Library's slideshare account:

Tips for Twitter IMPROVERS

from

University of York Library

I think the key to good feedback in a workshop is probably 10% about the content, 10% about the delivery, and 80% about whether it is pitched at the level the participants expect and require. That's probably an exaggeration but you get my point. I've blogged on here before about how I run sessions around Web 2.0 and academia for the Researcher Development Team at York, and in the last couple I've really felt for a small number of participants who were at a stage beyond the level I was pitching at. The workshops are introductions so participants literally set up, for example, a Twitter account from scratch - so anyone who is already past that point but wants to know about content and tone, is doing far too much thumb-twiddling for my liking, until later in the session.

With all that in mind, as of next academic year we're reworking the workshops, and in each case I'll run one 'A beginner's guide to' type session and one 'Improvers' type session, so people can get exactly what they need out of the workshops. We didn't have time to arrange that for this terms' workshops, so I produced the slides above to send on to participants of my introductory workshop, for those who wanted to go further. In January when the next set of workshops run (I don't do any in the Autumn term, because AUTUMN TERM), I'll flesh this out into a proper interactive 1.5 hour session.

Have I left anything important out? One of the things I love about Slideshare is that you can update and reupload slides over the same URL, so you don't lose that continuity (and your statistics). So if there's anything you'd add to this, let me know in a comment, and I can eventually make a new and improved version to put online in place of this one.

My advice to Tweeters: ignore advice to Tweeters...

I think guides for tweeting well are most important for organisations - it's key that companies, businesses and public bodies get this stuff right, and they often don't. For individuals though, I'm increasingly of the mind that unless you specifically want Twitter to DO something for you which it currently isn't doing (and the slides above are aimed at researchers who specifically want to grow their network in order to find more value in it), it's not worth reading 'how to tweet' guides (of the kind I used to write myself) and trying to change how you approach it. There's plenty of good advice to be had in these, but it's not necessary to follow any of it - apart from not being unpleasant or otherwise making people bad about themselves. If you want to tweet about your lunch every day, why should you stop doing that just to retain followers? I think it's better to be yourself and have a group of followers who are prepared to put with that, for better or for worse...

Number of followers isn't an end in itself. A smaller group of engaged followers who want to interact with YOU is far better than a huge group for whom you have to put on any kind of show. So while when writing in print it's important to adopt a style appropriate for the medium, I consider Twitter to be much closer to spoken communication. As long as you're prepared to deal with the consequences, why not just be yourself?

Can you use Twitter for Academic teaching? Yes, here are some examples

I have read, and contributed to, an awful lot of writing online about Twitter in HE. Social networks in general and Twitter in particular are increasingly accepted as a valuable part of the academic world. If you want to know about how to use Twitter for communication, for building reputation, for research, then Google will provide you with endless hours of reading. However, using Twitter in teaching seems to be far more tricky and ambiguous. There are a lot more people asking 'Can we use Twitter in academic teaching, and if so, how?' then answering that question. Interestingly, there's a lot more info out there in using it in the school classroom than on using it in the University seminar room, lab, or lecture theatre.

With that in mind, and to make the most of a real edtech zietgeist happening at the University of York at the moment, I put together a 1.5 hour workshop for academics, as part of a series I'm doing for the Learning & Teaching Forum. I really enjoyed putting this together because I learnt a lot, and spoke to a lot of academics doing really interesting things with tweets.

The biggest issue in this area seems to be that you can't make students sign up for the platform, so how do you make sure no one is excluded if you're providing key info via Twitter (without you having to duplicate everything)? The first answer is embedding a Twitter stream in the VLE - there is a full guide on how to do that (with BlackBoard) in the handout which accompanied the session (embedded below). The second answer is projecting a hashtag onto the walls during teaching. Chemistry at York is, for some reason, always at the front of the curve with social media, and one of the things Simon Lancaster does is have a back-channel running on big screens during lab-sessions, using Tweetbeam, so that students who don't wish to sign up for Twitter can still get the benefit of seeing other students' tweets (and also pictures shared by Simon). I really liked this idea - I liked the ceding of control, the high risk of it, and I like the fact that the students don't abuse the trust, and take the opportunity instead to contribute enthusiastically and productively.

Anyhow, here are the slides from the workshop - I hope if you're reading this you find them useful. If you're an academic and want to chip in via the comments with how you utilise Twitter, that would be great; if you're an information professional and you also run these sorts of workshops, I'd love to hear from you too.

Using Twitter in Academic Teaching from University of York Library

Using Twitter in Academic Teaching by University of York Information

Is the Library degree the best use of your resources? Imagine what else you could do with that time and money

Edit:  Despite my clarifications, people are still misinterpreting my original post as a proposed 'solution' to the problem of the Library degree, so I've rewritten this to stop that happening. ====

To embark upon a Library Masters in 2014 is a huge undertaking. Assuming you do it part-time, whilst working to support yourself, you’ll spend between ten and eighteen thousand pounds over two years, along with, at a conservative estimate, 1500 hours of your time.[1]

The question is, does the Library degree really represent the best use of this investment?

What if you were to spend the same amount of time and money on a self-structured curriculum of study, events, conferences, training, and building an online portfolio, whilst continuing to work in an information role. Would you not emerge as a more rounded, knowledgeable, and relevant information professional?

I think you would. If someone were to try it, the results would certainly be interesting. This is not, however, a solution to the problem.

The problem with the Library degree

I have many issues with the MA/Msc in Library & Information Management (or similar) as it currently stands, in the UK. For the record, I completed mine, via distance learning, in 2009. It was fine, I didn’t hate it, it wasn’t a bad degree in any way. My views on the degree are based on my own experience, and based on talking to others – I realise they may not be universal complaints. But here are the main ones anyway:

1)    Much of the content of the courses does not seem relevant to actually being an information professional

2)    There is one degree that is supposed to cover, in one year of full-time study, all aspects and types of librarianship, including public, academic and special librarianship (not to mention the myriad other potential careers under the information umbrella). As far as I can tell these disciplines are very different from each other

3)    Many of the courses contain modules they contained 10 years ago, despite the information world having undergone seismic shift in that time. Anything you learn on a library degree is likely to be out of date in two to five years anyway

4)    Having completed a Masters in another discipline prior to getting my Library one, I did not find the latter to be postgraduate in nature. It was just like a very short undergraduate course

5)    The piece of paper at the end – the degree certificate which allows you to apply for higher graded jobs for which a qualification is an ‘essential’ on the person spec – seems far more important than what you learn on the course itself

6)    The difference between a ‘qualified’ librarian and an ‘unqualified’ one is very rarely the qualification. It’s more often that the unqualified librarian’s circumstances are such that they have been unable to do the degree, rather than that they are in any way a lesser librarian

7)    The process by which CILIP accredits degrees and the institutions which offer them does not seem to be in any way rigorous, based on the experiences of colleagues who have attended certain institutions…

8)    To add insult to the injury of the points above, there are many more qualified librarians than there are posts for qualified librarians – meaning that in my own institution alone there are several very talented new professionals who have gone to the time and expense of getting the degree, but who are nevertheless in the same roles they were in whilst they studied

Most importantly, the degree is so expensive that it is actively excluding people from good jobs – we are putting a financial price on progress in our profession, and for what? A degree that isn’t particularly relevant or, in some cases, even particularly enjoyable to complete. I don’t think it’s acceptable that we’re all of us complicit in such a flawed system. Employers, students, CILIP, people like me who recognised the issues but did the Masters anyway just to get the piece of paper – we’re all part of the problem with the Library degree.

If you are going to create a professional environment in which a ten thousand pound degree is necessary to earn more than £25,000 a year, then the degree itself needs to be a LOT more meaningful than it is at present.

What do we do about it?

If it were up to me, I’d do two things:

A) re-design the Masters to be a Problem Based Learning (PBL) degree, which would allow a much closer connection between study and the reality of library work, and

B) issue some kind of nation-wide edict forcing all hiring library managers to give proper value to the second half of the sentence ‘Library qualification or equivalent experience’ which appears on so many job specs.

There are actually a pleasingly high number of hiring managers who do 'B' already, although it's not that wide-spread. But 'A' is a lot trickier.

I am writing (or was writing - we'll get there eventually!) an article with Alan Carbery about rethinking the degree as PBL. I find PBL incredibly difficult to explain succinctly - basically it's student centered learning, that is used in a lot of Medical Schools around the UK (including the one in my own institution). It's really very different from the traditional HE pedagogy. Here's an excerpt from what the BMJ has to say about it (read the whole page here)

In problem based learning (PBL) students use “triggers” from the problem case or scenario to define their own learning objectives. Subsequently they do independent, self directed study before returning to the group to discuss and refine their acquired knowledge. Thus, PBL is not about problem solving per se, but rather it uses appropriate problems to increase knowledge and understanding. The process is clearly defined, and the several variations that exist all follow a similar series of steps.

It sounds like it shouldn't work, but it does. Students absolutely love it. At my University it is also used, with great success, by the Law School, and it is their approach specifically that I'd like to see emulated with libraries. Here's what the Law School has to say about it:

You and your colleagues decide how your firm operates and determine how to divide up the work.  Through the process you will build working relationships with each other and learn how to deliver on your responsibilities.

For each case you will identify the legal principles involved in the problem and unravel the legal and contextual issues that lie at the heart of it, which will typically involve more than one area of law. All of the problems will be simulated real-life examples brought to you by virtual clients.

In many situations you will have to interact with other student firms, sometimes working alongside them, sometimes in opposition.

For me this notion of operating in firms with real-life examples is key. Based on UCAS applications etc the Law School tailors each firm to suit the personalities and talents of the people involved.

Imagine arriving at Library School and being divided up into Libraries, and then given real-life, pertinent, and up to date examples of problems Libraries face. You'd work cooperatively with your peers (and in the era of constant-contact media, Google hangouts etc, distance-learning shouldn't prohibit this) and deal with things which you really will have to deal with when working in a qualified library post. Issues around web-design and social media, around marketing and communications, around copyright, data protection and FOI, around managing budgets in difficult economic circumstances, around whatever is relevant and important, year on year. It's not just that it allows Library Schools to cover contemporary issues, it's the manner in which it is taught, which seems to relate more directly to the real world. Here's another quote, from the Law School's guide to students on their use of PBL:

The key role of the problem is to trigger your awareness that these issues exist, and create an interest in them by highlighting their real-world ramifications. Once this has happened, the problem then gives you a context which you can use to identify exactly what you need to learn in order to understand the problem and address the issues which it raises.

This, to me, sounds like the kind of approach which has the potential to produce Library Masters graduates who are significantly more qualified, aware, relevant and prepared, for the real-life world of libraries. In fact it's a bit like what we all do with our CPD anyhow.

Clearly this would be a massive shift in how things are done. Any library school attempting to implement this would have to completely scrap the existing degree and build a new one from the ground up. But I'd argue that needs to happen anyway; perhaps a new teaching method would add much needed impetus and inspiration.

I'd be interested if anyone reading this who is familiar with PBL, or with teaching on current Masters courses, has a view on this! Is it the kind of thing we could realistically do?

---

[1] You are notionally expected to spend 100 hours of study per 10 credits on the Masters – assuming you do the dissertation as well, there are 180 credits in the degree, so the total figure is 1,800 hours. I don’t believe anyone has ever spent 225 full 8-hour days studying for a Library Masters, so I reduced it to 1,500 hours, although that still seems fairly fanciful.

10 things to make a conference great

What makes a conference great? Andy Priestner posed the following question on Twitter today:

Pls RT (and respond): What makes for an amazing conference experience - specific ideas welcomed. Thank you!

— Andy Priestner (@PriestLib) December 16, 2013

I found my answer wouldn't fit even across loads of tweets. So with that in mind, and following on from the previous post on inspiring conferences, here's my personal opinions based on conferences I've attended.

1. The other delegates. This is very tricky. Much like what makes a good school experience isn't really the Ofsted report and the facilities so much as the other kids and whether they're nice, and a good job experience has (probably) more to do with your colleagues and line-manager than your salary and objectives, a good conference experience has a lot to do with the kind of crowd the conference attracts. If you get open, enthusiastic and practical people to hang out with, the presentations themselves are really just a springboard rather than the focus of the conference. What I remember most about SLA was the other delegates.
2. A good keynote from outside the industry. LILAC gives fanstastic keynote - and part of the reason is they bring in someone from outside of libraries, who knows enough about them to make their talk relevant without just pandering to librarians. Spare me people saying 'A library without a librarian is just a room' - guess how much that helps me? Correct: not at all.
3. A variety of formats. There's no excuse just to have a bunch of people doing long presentations, these days. I want to see Pecha Kucha 20/20s, I want to see Teachmeet style sharing, I want to see panel discussions, I want some unconference style rewriting of the hierarchy. Ideally, I'd like to see something not listed here because I've never seen it before. Surprise me.
4. Speakers who understand speaking rather than just the subject they've been asked to speak about. Don't tell me all about your methodology at the start - if you have to tell me about your methodology at all, do it after you've told me WHY I should care about it (i.e. give me the results first). On the subject of results, if you've not yet finished your project and can't tell us your conclusions, why are you here? And of course, don't get me started on presenters who can't be bothered to make decent presentations, or go over their time slots.
5. A mixture of the cerebral and the immediate. I want to be inspired, uplifted, and invigorated. I ALSO want to be able to go back to my desk when the conference is finished and change the way I work, for the better, right away.
6. New blood. I want there to be new professionals at any event I go to, because apart from being, obviously, The Future, they're often the most enthusiastic and passionate. So make sure your event offers hard-up new profs the chance to attend and ideally to present too. (On a related note, I'd recommend going to New Profs events even if you aren't so 'new' anymore; it restores your faith...)
7. A lead organiser who really has their shit together. I've been to conferences where the person effectively chairing the event seems completely at sea, or not to be invested in the success of  the day at all. Organising conferences is REALLY hard (I've done it, enjoyed it, but resolved to stick to speaking from then on because that is MUCH easier) so you've got to be completely committed and quite sharp, and creative, and good at logistics, to make a success of it.
8. An appropriate level of resource. It is possible to organise conferences and unconferences very cheaply, but that needs to be built into the DNA of the conference. A hugely ambitious conference shouldn't be attempted without a hugely ambitious budget. I'm quite happy to sleep through 15-minutes of sponsor-talk at the start of each day if it means the event is well financed and everything works.
9. Technology. If the wifi is no good, find another venue. If the screens are small, find another venue. If the presenter PCs are positioned so the presenter has to look away from the audience to present, find another venue. If someone is doing a presentation via Skype or a webinar software then by God they'd better give a transcendent and truly transformative talk if we're to suffer through the 100% inevitable bad sound quality, visual glitches, and delays where the screen goes blank.
10. Downtime. I'm an introvert. Most people going to library conferences are introverts. Introverts need time to recharge, away from the crowds, or we go a bit loopy. So the best conference schedules, for me, are the ones brimming with activity - but with some downtime built in too.

Anything you'd add?