Blogs

You each will now have your own blog. Unlike what you may think about the world of teen angst blogging, this method of content creation is useful and is the main mechanism by which you will post intelligent content to this site. More than journaling, this is how you will write stories relating to areas of research and industry news that you want to share with the AWG or IMT in general. It is your platform to voice your expert opinion on various IT topics. Simply select a Topic appropriate for you content, you can even select multiple topics if they apply. Just want to share a link and a blurb? Use the Web Link node type under "create content". Have an image of an architectural diagram that explains your design, create an Image Node Type, or simply link to the image via html. When you post a blog entry you can choose whether or not you want AWG members to be able to comment on what you posted. The comment system allows for threaded discussions below the topic. These posts are not nodes in themselves, but can be linked to with an anchor tag. If you have a long post, it is better to respond to a blog entry with another blog entry rather than a comment. This is especially true if you would like your post to be world viewable since the comments are not world readable. But for conversations around a topic the comment system is effective.

Beyond posting stories for discussion, you can also use your Blog as a work journal. Set the topic to "WorkBlog" to keep a log of things you are working on. Maybe its the end of the day and you would like to write some quick notes to come back to in the future. This will alow us to share with eachother interesting things we are working on at APU. You can of course select WorkBlog and other IT related topics that you wish to file your entry under.

A link to your blog is provided in the Members page. You can hand out your blog link www.apu.edu/imt/awg/blog/[username] to those you want to follow your posts. Even better, an RSS feed is generated for each blog, allowing other sites, or client side RSS readers to pull content. The link is provided wherever you see the icon. The entire site is RSS enabled, so you will see xml icons on various sections. The xml icon on the front page, in the syndication block, only fetches the front page stories. More on this later, but each taxonomy term has its own RSS feed, so those only interested in certain topics can pull stories.