EBI is an Outstation of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory.

How to blog

Dr. Duncan Hull, Software engineer, EBI Chemoinformatics and Metabolism

Ontogenesis: blogging a book

What is a blog?

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A blog (a contraction of “web log”) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog

c.f. Scientific Journal and Book publishing

1. Frequently / regularly updated – never “finished”?

2. Feeds: (a) Subscription and (b) Syndication

3. Post publication “peer - review”

4. Accessible statistics

5. Personal and/or Informal

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Picture by Julian Cash http://www.flickr.com/photos/9494134@N05/752021495/

1. Regular / frequent updates

• Most blogs are constantly updated • anything from many times per day to once every few months• Frequency / regularity determined by author(s) (not publishers)

• Frequency can be very low e.g. Tim Berners-Lee http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/blog/4

• …Last updated 27th March 2008…

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2. This works because of Feeds

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• How many know what a feed is?• How many use a feed reader?

RSS ATOM

Allows a) subscription and b) syndication

For example…http://knowledgeblog.org

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This site is available as a feed

e.g. In http://www.google.com/reader

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subscribe

2. (a) Subscribers are notified of updates

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Notification of update e.g. like email / subscribing to a Table of Contents of a journal

2. (b) Feeds also allow Syndication

• Data can easily and automatically be re-used elsewhere• E.g. blogs.nature.com and researchblogging.org

(hundreds / thousands of authors)

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3. Peer-review (sort of)

• Rather than being peer-reviewed before publication, blogs are typically peer-reviewed after publication (if at all)

• This is done by 1 Comments

2 Linkbacks

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Automatically inform author(s) when another site has linked to theirs

4. Accessible statistics

• Most viewed (popularity)• Referrals (where web traffic is coming from)• Clicks (what links are being followed)• Search engine terms (what keywords used to find blog)

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5. Personal / Informal Style

• Many blogs are written from a personal point of view, like a diary or laboratory notebook• Informal, first person singular:

• E.g. “Fred Bloggs told me that x was a big load of …”

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• Formal, third person, scientific style”• E.g. “Bloggs et al (2009) suggest that x is flawed …”

How to blog

• We are using WordPress, which comes in two flavours:

• Wordpress.com : Hosted e.g. http://rbaltman.wordpress.com/

Russ Altman, Stanford

• Wordpress.org: Self–hosted e.g. http://blogs.bbsrc.ac.uk Douglas Kell, BBSRC

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How to blog with wordpress

• Either login to knowledgeblog.org • Write while logged in • save as draft

• Or write chapters the usual way• login then cut-and paste

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Once logged in you’ll see this

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Acknowledgements

• Robert Stevens• Phil Lord• Christoph Steinbeck (EBI)

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Happy blogging, any questions?

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