Blogging Workshop Booklet

NED POTTER

BLOGS & BLOGGING

New Professionals Conference 2010 | University of Sheffield

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Blogs & Blogging

The importance of an online presence: entering the world of blogs and blogging Welcome to the booklet for the workshop. The idea of this document is to provide details of the practical exercises, and to expand upon some of the stuff we’ll touch on in the slides and in the Prezi. There’s also a list of 10 essential blogs for you to subscribe to.

The references for everything I’ve used in this workshop are on the workshop delicious page (the URL for which is below) - Ned

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Exercise A

Introduce yourselves using our test blog

1. You should already have http://delicious.com/wikimanworkshop open in your Browser at this stage - the first link after this one is to the test blog. Click on it, and sign in using your wordpress.com log-in (if you’ve forgotten the details, they’ll be in the sign-up email you received) 2. Select ‘wikimanworkshop’ from the My Dashboards drop-down menu along the top 3. You’ll be greeted by the home Dashboard screen. Click on Posts from the light-blue menus down the left hand side, then Add New (also from the left-hand side) 4. Put your name in the Title field, and write a brief paragraph saying why you chose to come on this workshop in the main field. You don’t need to do anything fancy – just start typing!

[But if you do want to know and do more complex stuff, read the anatomy below and try adding in some formatting or links etc]

Anatomy of the Add New Post screen: Top half:

The tool bar: Hovering over each of these icons will tell you what they do. The furthest one on the right, top row, hides or reveals the second row down – if you can’t see ‘Paragraph’ the other icons on the second row, click this and they’ll appear.

It works just like Microsoft Word, but with less complexity. The things you’ll probably ending up using all the time are the formatting drop-down menu (that’s the thing that saying ‘Paragraph’ by default), the link icon (little picture of a chain link, on the top row) and the first of the Upload / Insert icons just above the tool bar – the little rectangle is what you press to put a picture into your post.

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If you fancy it: Try putting a sub-heading into your introduction post, and use the formatting drop down menu to format it as ‘Heading 2’. Then add the sentence “This workshop is part of the CILIP New Professionals Conference’ to the bottom of your post, highlighting the bit which says ‘the CILIP New Professionals Conference’ and clicking the link icon. Then copy the URL below into the LINK URL field, choose Open link in a new window from the Target drop-down menu, and add an explanation to the ‘Title’ window.

I like to have links open in a new window because that way the reader still has your blog open. It’s very important to use the ‘Title’ tag properly – it tells the reader what will happen when they click on the link. Just putting the name of the site you’re linking to isn’t good practice – visually impaired readers using assistive software may be hearing the screen read out to them, so if it says ‘go to’ they know it’s a link and they know where it’ll take them.

The publish section: this is where you press ‘publish’ and your post wings its way out into the world. Preview is very useful – always, always preview your final draft before you publish it, not just to read it through but to make sure the formatting is right, pictures in the right place, links are working etc.

The categories section: categories are a useful way of sign-posting the content of your posts. I have broad ones like ‘CIIP’, ‘Digitisation’, ‘Marketing’ and ‘Technologies’. Often if people like a post on a certain subject and want to know more, they’ll click on that category to see the rest of the posts relating to that area; categories help people navigate around your blog.

If you fancy it: Tick the ‘NPC2010 Delegate Example’ tag for your post.

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Bottom half:

Post Tags: Tags are a very important blogging tool – they’re part of what search engines and tagging sites use to find your posts. If there is a spate of blog posts, pictures, videos etc on the same subject, they’ll have the same tag, making them easy to find and group together. For example, all media relating to today (such as the delicious bookmarks we’re using in this workshop, and all twitter activity around the conference) carries the tag npc2010.

So for your posts, add any tags that you think will help direct people to your blog.

If you fancy it: add the npc2010 tag to your introductory post.

Excerpt: This is a field you can ignore entirely if you wish. In some feed-readers (the things people use to subscribe to blogs) only a few lines of a blog post will display initially, with the reader being able to click a ‘see more’ button to read the rest. If you want to, you can add a manually written summary into the ‘Excerpt’ field which will appear instead of the first few lines of your post. Useful at times (if the first few lines of your post are on a completely different topic to the rest of it, for example) but not essential.

If you fancy it: summarise your post in a single sentence and type it into the Excerpt field.

Send Trackbacks: If you’re linking to other blog posts, Trackbacks are important. They send a small section of your post (the bit either side of the link) as a comment to the blog post in question. This serves two functions: it’s a courtesy to the person you’re quoting, to let them know, and it means there’s a link back to your own post for those who are interested.

If you use Wordpress and are linking to other Wordpress blogs, you don’t need to manually input Trackbacks – it’ll be done automatically for you (known as ‘Pingbacks’). For other blogging platforms, you it is best practice to put in a Trackback (unless you’ve got a particular reason not to).

Discussion: If you don’t want to allow people to comment for any reason, you can untick these boxes.

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Exercise B

Use Personas to find out what the internet thinks of you right now

Go to the second link on http://delicious.com/wikimanworkshop - Personas. Once you’ve clicked Launch Personas type your name and see what the internet thinks you are all about. Did it see you as you’d like to be seen?

If you have a very unusual name the results may be relatively correct. But either way, chances are Google doesn’t reflect you accurately at all – here’s a quote from the Personas website: It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.

People WILL already be Googling you. You don’t want to leave that part of your reputation unmanaged. So while computers may always misrepresent our ‘digital traces’, it helps if you can take control to some extent by developing an online presence and profile.

If you fancy it: try coming back to Personas in 6 months time, and seeing if your blog has made any difference to the outcome!

REF

For reference

This bit of the booklet should provide you with a bunch of stuff you can refer back to when you starting blogging in earnest. First of all, here’s some more information on stuff that was mentioned in passing on the Prezi.

Choosing a blogging platform So you want to create your own website – there are three approaches taken by most Information Professionals.

The first, and easiest, is to write a blog hosted on a blogging site. The second is to write a blog which you host yourself. The third is creating an entire site of your own. You can also mix these last two together, as I have done with thewikiman.org.

Option 1, then – the blog hosted on a blogging site (a developer-hosted platform, to give it its proper name). The major advantage of this is that it is incredibly straightforward, and usually free. You simply sign up for an account with Blogger or WordPress.com (the .com is important there; it’s what separates WordPress’s developer-hosted platform software from its user-hosted platform, WordPress.org, which we’ll explore in Option 2) or any of the other examples, and start blogging away almost instantaneously. The major disadvantage of going down this route is the lack of flexibility you have in terms of what you publish – you don’t get as much control over how it

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looks, or what features it has. That’s not to say it won’t be good though – an example of a blog like this is Thoughts of a [wannabe] librarian.

Option 2 is user-hosted platforms. This means installing the software (such as WordPress.org, which I use on my own blog and comes highly recommended, arguably as the industry standard) on your own server - or rather one which you pay a web-hosting company to use - and creating a more sophisticated blog as your own website. You get much more flexibility this way (you can customise your blog, essentially, and add a lot more useful features and functions – see Joeyanne’s blog, with its custom-designed theme) and you can even add further pages in addition to the blog page, to create a larger site. The downside to this is that you will have to pay for hosting and registration (more on which below), and you still don’t have quite as much control over your content and presentation as you would in… …Option 3, developing your own site from scratch. Like so many things in life, the option that offers the most rewards is also the hardest to achieve! With your own website your only limitation is really your own ability to write xhtml – if you’ve no skills in this area whatsoever, clearly this isn’t the way to go for you. But if you know how to use Dreamweaver from editing work web-pages etc, then creating your own site offers an unparalleled level of flexibility and customisation – you create exactly what you want, to reflect you. And of course, you can also have a blog on it too – either using the approach described in Option 2, or just updating your pages. The downsides are that it is a lot more complicated doing things yourself, you need to keep updating it and keeping it fresh and contemporary, and, as in Option 2, you have to pay for hosting and for your domain name. Let’s look at that in a bit more detail.

(There is an Option 4, of paying a company to do the lot – design the site, update the site, host the site etc. But that’s pretty lazy for an Information Professional! Designing your own is a much better experience to have.)

Registering a domain name Option 1 will provide a domain name for you, probably something along the lines of http://exampleblogname.exampledevelopername.com. But if you’re hosting your own blog or creating your own site, you need a domain name, and that needs to be registered.

The first thing to do after choosing a name is find out if someone else has nabbed it already. You can type it into your Browser’s address bar, and see if you get a website, or an error message; an error message means it either hasn’t been registered, or the person who’s registered it hasn’t yet attached it to a website. Most hosting sites will have some kind of search facility to allow you to check for sure whether a URL is available or not, or you can use a dedicated search site such as http://www.who.is/.

It typically costs between £6 – £15 per annum to register a domain name (some places lock you in for a minimum of two years) depending on what it ends with; one-dot names tend to be more expensive than two-dot names such as .org.uk, and I personally think it is worth the extra cost for a punchier URL. I would have liked to use .com for my site, but sadly both the .com and .co.uk derivatives of thewikiman and wikiman were already taken. My view is that it is a battle to get anyone remember your website address at all, so the snappier it can be the better – I’d always choose .com or .org over .co.uk for that reason, as I think people already start to fall asleep by the time you’ve said the first ‘dot’ let alone the second one.

There are specialist sites whose primary focus is domain-name registration (123-reg is an example), but really they all offer hosting as well these days, so you may as well look for the site which offers you the best hosting package for your needs, and then get them to register your domain name at the same time. It costs me £12 per year to register www.thewikiman.org with my hosting company, Clook.

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Hosting Your website needs to be hosted somewhere. If you work in an academic library, the library web-pages will probably be hosted on University servers. If you are an uber-techno geek and spend a lot of money on computer hardware, you may even have your own server. For the rest of us, we have to pay a company to host it.

The choice of hosting package is very important – you need to make sure the one you go for is appropriate for the specific needs of your particular site. Things to look for are price, size, email addresses, bandwidth and whether or not you are going have advertising forced upon you. Often very cheap (or free) hosting will look excellent in most respects, but will be crucially lacking one area which will make you rue not spending a little extra cash… Don’t be too seduced by the space (or size) of the website either: packages offering 500MB of 1GB of space seem very generous, but unless you are dealing with a lot of huge files you may not need most of it. My site, for example, totals far, far less than my allowance at the time of writing. The final thing you may need to look out for is whether MySQL databases are included in the package, and if so how many there are. You won’t need any for a basic site with static pages, but for dynamically generated content like forums, or a blog, which are constantly changing and being updated, you will need MySQL databases to run these successfully.

For a previous site I created, I used Free Virtual Servers. As the title suggests the hosting was free, but of course the domain name still costs me an annual fee. What caught me out was the lack of bandwidth (or data transfer), basically because at the time I had no idea how important it was. Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that is transferred from your site to the person viewing the site. This does not just mean when they download a file, or right-click and save an image. Every time they load up a page of your site, the sum-total size of all the files on that page are ‘transferred’ – so if the pic you use in your header is 100KB, then 10 people opening the page equals 1MB of data-transfer (or even just the same person pressing ‘Refresh’ 9 times). Your hosting package will impose a monthly limit on you (that is what the figure listed against Bandwidth refers to, when you view the spec of a hosting package) – do not accept any kind of hosting with a small monthly limit! My Free Virtual Servers package was excellent in every way except its Bandwidth limit was, it turns out, tiny; this meant that around 10 or 12 days into each month, traffic to the site was such that I exceeded my limit, and the site went down for the rest of the month. There is nothing you can do about this once it happens, so do everything to avoid it happening in the first place… Incidentally, Free Virtual Servers have apparently increased their bandwidth limit on all their packages, so they may be worth checking out.

I used Clook for this site. It costs me £50 per year (plus VAT, which I should of course claim back as this is a professional website, but I’ve not got around to sorting that kind of thing yet!) for shared-hosting, and I could have chosen to pay £5 a month, working out at slightly more over the year, if I’d wanted. The only problems with shared-hosting arise if the other sites which share your server are using too much of its resources and everything starts to slow down, but this should never happen with a decent hosting company. Shared-hosting is the standard way of doing things, as to rent your own dedicated server from a hosting company would cost you literally thousands of pounds per year. For my £50 I get 500MB of space (more than enough), 50 email inboxes (much more than enough), and crucially for me after my problems with the other site, 10GB of bandwidth / data transfer (hopefully, enough…). It also offers the option of hosting two websites in the same package – although all the resources listed above would be shared between the two of them, and of course I would have to pay to register the other domain name separately. But that still represents a useful feature, if you’re itching to create a second site as well as your professional one.

I would whole-heartedly recommend Clook, as it is good value and very easy to use, their technical support is said to be excellent and, according to a web-developer friend of mine who knows about these things, “they are not at all evil” – so that can only be a good thing…

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Registering your blog Those places you need to register your blog, again: 

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Register the blog with Google (http://www.google.com/addurl/) The first thing to do is to tell Google that your new site exists. Go to the URL above and ‘share your site’ with Google. Thereafter you can boost your site’s search-engine ranking by linking to it from other sites.

(There are specialist sites which just offer endless links to other sites for this purpose, which is a bit naff.

A better way of achieving links is to comment on others’ blogs with your URL included, or, ideally, have other people link to your blog from their blogrolls – clearly they’ll only do this if they think your blog is any good…). A very basic explanation of all this is that every couple of days, Google ‘crawls’ the entire internet, looking for links. The more links there are to your site, the more important Google will think your site is – and therefore the more readily it will come up when people search for it.

Link to it from the UK Library blogs wiki (http://uklibraryblogs.pbworks.com/) This wiki was originally created by Jo Alcock and Jennifer Findlay, and tries to list as many library blogs as possible in the UK – both individual blogs and organizational blogs. Sign up to be able to edit the wiki, find the appropriate section for your blog, and add a link and a brief description of what it’s all about.

Burn a feed with Feedburner (http://feedburner.google.com/) Feedburner is quite hard to explain succinctly. Basically, it is a way of ensuring that you know how many people are reading your blog, and what they are reading – which allows you to refine and improve your posts depending on what works and what doesn’t. It also makes it easier for people to subscribe, as they get more options to subscribe to a feedburner feed, than a normal feed. (The ‘feed’ is just the output of your blog – a feedburner feed carries a slightly different URL to a regular feed – but you don’t need to worry about that, just register for it!) The important thing here is to do this early – when you set up a big subscribe button on your blog, you want to have the feedburner URL on hand so people can subscribe to that.

So, go to the URL above, register your blog, create a feed, and get the Feedburner Feedsmith plug-in if you’ve got a self-hosted blog (see the Plug-ins section, below) so you get statistics delivered straight to your Dashboard.

Register your Gravatar: (http://en.gravatar.com/) It’s a good idea to keep a consistent visual identity throughout all your social media – one way to do this is to register a globally recognised vatar (or Gravatar). Choose a logo or head-shot of yourself and upload it to the site – that’ll then display whenever you comment on your own or other people’s blogs.

Write an entry for Library Routes! (http://libraryroutesproject.wikkii.com) The Library Routes Project is an online movement initiated by Laura Woods and myself, intended to document the root of librarians’ entry to the profession, and their route through it. There are nearly 150 blog entries linked from the wiki, saying lots of interesting stuff. It has been viewed by over 17,000 people – so if you add your entry, it’ll put your blog on the map.

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Widgets & Plug-ins If you are using Wordpress.com there are a few things you can do to customise your blog – you can change the theme (or appearance) of your blog, and you can add the pre-determined widgets to it as well. When you select the ‘Widgets’ menu of your blog’s Dashboard, you get all of them listed there for you – then you can simply drag across the ones you want into the side-bars on the right.

So as you can just about see on the screen-grab from our test blog below, I’ve dragged the Blog Subscriptions, RSS Links, Links, Twitter, and Delicious widgets from the middle to Sidebar 1 on the right – this makes these widgets active on the blog.

So Sidebar 1 comes out as the column on the left hand side of the blog, as seen by your readers:

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As you can see, there’s the widgets on the left-hand side, with the main body of the blog post on the right.

If you go down the wordpress.org, self-hosted blog route as outlined above in the ‘Choosing a blogging platform’ section, you get to install plug-ins from a choice of literally thousands, rather than choose from a small selection of widgets. This obviously gives you a huge amount more flexibility. You can search the plug-ins pages for whatever you need (such as Google Analytics), or just search by what’s new, or perhaps just install whatever plug-ins are most highly rated by everyone else. You’ll find, over time, what works for you. To start off with, though, here’s the plug-ins mentioned in the Prezi, complete with URLs. (To be honest though, it’s a lot easier to type their names into the Plug-ins search box of your blog Dashboard, than it is to go to the site and try and manually install them. Auto-installing them works very well, as long as you are using Firefox and not Internet Explorer which, for whatever reason, seems to prevent half of the really good plug-ins from installing correctly).

Askimet: this protects you from spam comments. As your blog gets more successful it’ll get spammed more often – mine gets more than 100 offers of Viagra etc a day, so a spam filter is a must. http://akismet.com/ Twitter: there are a thousand and one twitter plug-ins to display your latest tweets alongside your blog – this is worth doing as it sort of completes the circuit between your social media and encourages people to interact with you over more than one platform. Pick the plug-in that works for you – my current blog theme has one built-in, but prior to that I used Viralogy Twitter Sidebar. http://www.viralogy.com/ Feedburner Feedsmith: this is the plug-in you need to go with the nice shiny new Feedburner account you set up during the ‘Plug-ins’ bit above. http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/help/wordpress_quickstart Feed Subscriber Stats: a sort of companion piece to Feedsmith above, this displays the number of subscribers and views your blog is getting on your Dashboard, saving you having to go to your Feedburner account separately to look them up. It’s important not to get too worried about the number of subscribers you have – large numbers are not an end in itself. But you can use the figures to evaluate how you are doing – a gradual, slow improvement is a very good sign! It takes a LONG time to get a lot of subscribers so don’t worry if it’s slow initially – people simply won’t know your blog exists until you tell them. (Another thing to note is that the number of subscribers Feedburner thinks you have will fluctuate wildly. There are various complicated explanations for this, but what you need to know is, if your subscriber stat suddenly falls by 50% it doesn’t mean 50% of the people have actually un-subscribed – it’ll probably go back up the next day. Best to take a week’s worth of stats and work out a sort of average to get a proper figure…) http://www.allancollins.net/368/feed-subscriber-stats-3/ Wordpress Popular Posts: if you display the five posts with the most views or comments, it may draw people in to explore your blog further. It’s like a sort of greatest hits package – a quick and easy way for people to see what your blog is about. I personally have my top 5 set to comments as I value interactivity more than views, but obviously you can do it however you want. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-popular-posts AddToAny: Subscribe Button- allows people to bookmark or subscribe to your blog via numerous platforms – they click the button and it gives them loads of options such as Google Reader, Netvibes, etc etc. http://www.addtoany.com/buttons/ Backtype Connect - picks up links to your post from twitter and relevant comments from other blogs – so for example if someone says on Twitter ‘I love this post from *blogging name+ – made me reconsider technology in

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the library! *link to your post+’ then that will appear as a comment on your blog, if you want it to. Essentially, Backtype Connect expands the possibility for responses and debate regarding your blog. http://www.backtype.com/plugins/connect/ Wordpress Stats - allows you to see which posts are viewed more than others, the links your readers click, and how they get to your blog. I actually find this much more useful than subscriber numbers as a tool for evaluation and self-assesment – you get a proper idea of which posts work and which don’t. http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/ Subscribe To Comments - allows people to subscribe to the comments feed of a specific post. This is essential stuff, as people will likely be commenting on a large number of blogs; they’ll only come back and have a conversation with you if they get an email prompting them that there has been a reply to their original comment – they’ll get that email with this plug-in. http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/

A note on themes Whether you are self-hosting or using a hosted blog, you’ll need to choose a ‘theme’ – basically, the way your blog looks. There are lots to choose from (many more if you’re self-hosting) so you can find one you like and then update it later to something else if you wish.

The important thing to remember is the theme has to function well for your blog. That it looks nice is obviously fairly important as people discovering your blog don’t want to be presented with something garish or hard to read – but subscribers will mostly read your blog in their feed-readers, meaning they won’t see the theme anyway. It’s essential that your theme allows you to use the widgets / plug-ins you want to use, successfully. I recently changed my theme because the old one didn’t make best use of my plug-ins, even though it looked nicer than the current one and better suited the visual identity of my main website .

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10 Essential Blogs for New Professionals Here is a list of 10 essential blogs all new professionals should read.

The if you could only subscribe to one blog, blog: I think Bobbi Newman is a fantastic asset to the library community. She should be the first person you follow on Twitter (not only does she create useful content herself, but via Twitter she will tell you about just about every single useful interesting post ever written by anyone else and provide a link to it) and her blog – LibrarianbyDay – is the blog you should subscribe to if you only have time for one. She is the creator of the excellent Library Day in the Life Project, a big advocate of the transliteracy movement, and appears to be completely free of ego or artifice despite obviously being very successful. http://librarianbyday.net The this is what you need to know about information and technology, blogs: If you subscribe to Phil Bradley and Stephen Abram’s blogs, you will have enough information to last you the rest of your career. Both of these blogs are updated very regularly (often multiple times a day) so can be quite intimidating to subscribe to! But it’s worth it.

If there’s a technology or platform out there potentially relevant to the world of information, Phil has tried it out for you and posted a review. If there’s a report or infographic hot off the press that is potentially relevant to the world of information, Stephen has digested it, reproduced the highlights, and linked to the original for you. http://www.philbradley.typepad.com/ http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com/ The thinker’s blog. Andy Woodworth’s Agnostic Maybe blog is very popular and often gets people talking – he likes to explore deep ideas to do with advocacy, customer service, our role in this day and age etc. http://agnosticmaybe.wordpress.com/ The it is peer reviewed and the posts are freaking huge, blog. Library with the Lead Pipe is a mega-blog contributed to by several people. The posts are infrequent, well-researched, peer-reviewed, and huge. I absolutely love the rigorous academic standards of a journal, mixed with the instant accessibility and commentbased interaction of a blog. http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/ The frank and honest, lively and enthusiastic accounts of what they’ve been doing, blog. Librarians on the Loose is a really, really good blog. Librarians Emma and Sarah work for Brighton University library, are extremely proactive, have their fingers in many pies and get up to all sorts of stuff. This is a very honest blog, written by two lovely people. http://librariansontheloose.wordpress.com/

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The excellent UK mixtures of reporting and ideas, blogs. They’re like a triumvirate of women to watch! Jo Alcock, Bethan Ruddock and Woodsiegirl’s blogs are all very much essential subscribes. Jo has been blogging since about the dawn of time, and often casts her experienced eye over pertinent issues of the day. She’s particularly interested in social media, and marketing.

Both Bethan and Woodsiegirl have an unerring ability to draw the reader in to something relevant to them – I’m genuinely envious of the way they can take even something small and everyday and make it really interesting and involving, as well as dealing with the big stuff too. Both are quite interactive blogs, too – lots of comments, and responses to comments. http://www.joeyanne.co.uk/ http://bethaninfoprof.wordpress.com/ http://woodsiegirl.wordpress.com/

And finally… the New Professionals blog. As part of the new network for LIS New Professionals (known as LISNPN) Chris Rhodes’ New Professionals blog, which is written by him and occasionally by CILIP New Professionals Support Officers, has moved from its old stand-alone location to be part of LISNPN. If you subscribe to this you’ll get news and updates about LISNPN itself, too. Self explanatory why this is an essential blog for New Professionals, really – it’s written for them and by them! http://www.lisnpn.spruz.com/blog.htm Happy subscribing.