library and wikis
Jemma Neville
How are things?
When you feel like a break from Calico Jack work (does that happen with a tech geek?), I'd be grateful if you could give some thought to the following issues that I'm having trouble with:
- Have you any suggestions as to how we best categorise the 'Online Library' section of the Malawi blog? I feel that the page is just a series of unconnected web links at the moment. I'd like to order links by health theme. I've already 'bundled' the tags together. Can you think of anything else I could do? Would we be best to create a 'Wiki'? As we were thinking of Wikis as the best method form clinic information documents, I should probably do some ground work on Wikis anyway. Maybe we could tee up a tutorial in late February/ March?
- I've been going to some Business Gateway lectures about optimising web hits on search engines, amongst other things. I installed the Google Analytics tool with this in mind but I can't identify the correct place in the hypertext source to insert the 'tagging'. Do you think these tools work with blog sites? Not very important if not - I'd just be curious to monitor the hits.
All the best and thanks in advance,
Jemma
PS: thank you for the frequent google reader recommendations from 'Inky Harmonics - it doesn't go unnoticed!
Rick Moynihan
> Hi Rick
>
> How are things?
>
> When you feel like a break from Calico Jack work (does that happen with a
> tech geek?),
Yes, it has been known to happen :-)
> Have you any suggestions as to how we best categorise the 'Online Library'
> section of the Malawi blog? I feel that the page is just a series of
> unconnected web links at the moment. I'd like to order links by health
> theme. I've already 'bundled' the tags together. Can you think of anything
> else I could do? Would we be best to create a 'Wiki'? As we were thinking of
> Wikis as the best method form clinic information documents, I should
> probably do some ground work on Wikis anyway. Maybe we could tee up a
> tutorial in late February/ March?
It depends on what we want. If we want to provide a method for
enabling the community (or even members of the public) to generate
online documents (i.e. web pages) with outgoing links and connecting
them together as a site then a wiki is a good solution.
If however all you want is to provide a series of categorised links to
other resources, and not provide anything of our own beyond the
categorisation then something "lighter" like del.icio.us is probably
more suited. By the way, on the subject of del.icio.us, you don't
need to put in commas after your tags, a space is enough.
> I've been going to some Business Gateway lectures about optimising web hits
> on search engines, amongst other things. I installed the Google Analytics
> tool with this in mind but I can't identify the correct place in the
> hypertext source to insert the 'tagging'. Do you think these tools work with
> blog sites?
Google analytics is a fantastic tool, and well praised, however it is
unfortunately not possible to use it with our blog at the moment. The
problem is that wordpress.com are using it already for their own site
analysis, and you can't run it twice on the same page.
This shouldn't be a problem however as you can get basic statistics by
logging into the blog and going to:
dashboard -> blog stats
This isn't as comprehensive as Google Analytics, but it should
suffice. In terms of SEO, where our aim is presumably to get more
readers and generate more impact, then the biggest gains are probably
to be made by trying to get more incoming links to the blog.
Writing appropriate comments on other peoples blogs with links back to
articles on our blog is one way of getting more attention. Also
getting ourselves listed on an aggregator such as afrigator, or
digg.com (which tends to be biased more towards tech) is a good way of
drawing in more readers.
>Not very important if not - I'd just be curious to monitor the
> hits. Finally, some good news regarding access to the blog site in NHS
> Lothian. I've persuaded their IT team to permit access to all the site
> (barring the Flickr photos). This seems a good compromise for the moment.
> The Practice Manager at Stockbridge Blue is pleased. We'll have to gradually
> persuade them to allow one-off access to video content sites!
That's excellent news, it's just a shame about the draconian NHS
firewall policies.
> All the best and thanks in advance,
>
> PS: thank you for the frequent google reader recommendations from 'Inky
> Harmonics - it doesn't go unnoticed!
>
It's a pleasure.
R.
Jemma Neville
Thank you for this.
I think the 'lighter' categorisation options is sufficient but I'd like to make it more user-friendly and list articles by medical theme (rather than date of entry). I'll persevere for the moment and discuss it with you the next time we meet.
The blog stats tool is great - thanks for the tip - very interesting!
I continue to leave thinly veiled 'PR' comments on other blogs.
The problem is that the blog site is useful to a limited extent until all the Malawi clinics get connected. Our shipment of computers has still not reached Lilongwe and until that happens Malawi readership is considerably less than I would hope it to be. It's a frustrating situation for everyone.
Will keep you updated.
thanks,
Jemma