We’ve had a couple of enquiries lately about using the Otago Blogs service for various types of departmental website. The Blogs service is used for a wide variety of sites – from research blogs, to project sites, to news sites (like this one!). Some of the fantastic blogs that we host are:
- Centre for Research on Colonial Culture
- Centre for the Book
- Otago Business School Building Redevelopment
- Public Health Expert
The great thing about Otago Blogs is that they’re quick and easy to set up, and there’s no charge to departments to use the service. You can quickly establish a presence for your committee, project, working group or team, and add posts, pages, files and media.
If your blog will eventually hold a reasonable amount of content, you’ll need to think about how your visitors can browse and search it in order to find content. This is where tagging can be really useful. On this blog, if you’re viewing the page on a web browser (rather than on a mobile device) you’ll see our tag cloud over on the right hand side.
Tags are key-words that you assign to your page or post, at the time of creation (or even afterwards). Once you’ve tagged your content with your key word/s, you can then choose to display a Tag Cloud widget on your blog (don’t worry if you don’t know how to do that – we have instructions!). The fantastic thing about a tag cloud is that, first, it allows your readers to browse content by key word; and second, it increases the font size of the tags you use most often. On the Public Health Expert blog, you can see that “diet”, “healthy eating”, “smoking” and “tobacco” are the most popular tags.
If you’d like to know more about Blogs or tags, please visit the Blog Help Site, or contact the helpful folks on the ITS Service Desk.
