The Blogging Pool

This is most of the crowd that turned up for Blog Standard at QUB on Jan 11. That's me in the middle twiddling with a beard and one other member is, of course, holding the camera.
It was a good session, with presentations by Ruth Jackson, Jude Collins, Oliver Corr and Bronagh Lawson.
Steve McBride and Geoff McGimpsey who were there will hopefully share their blogging ambitions with us at later meetings.
We have a decent room in the Peter Froggatt Centre now with a projector, a computer that works and audio.
Until now we have been using the seminar room in the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, which I am planning to rename, The Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Broadcast Journalism, Memoir, Blogging and Ribald Exchanges.

Meeting at Queens

Blog Standard will meet on Tuesday 11th at the Peter Froggatt Centre at QUB at 7.pm

We'll be in room 02.010; that's on the second floor.

We will be looking at use of photography at this meeting and Ruth Jackson will be one of the speakers.

Blog Standard is an open forum for the discussion of blogging, the techniques and the approaches. Everybody welcome.

Urgent notice

The Jan 4 meeting of Blog Standard has been postponed until Jan 11.

Tonight's speaker

Phil O'Kane or Iced Coffee will speak tonight at Blog Standard about his blogging and hosting methods.

We are meeting at the Seamus Heaney Centre (48 University Road) at 7.00.

This is open to anyone who blogs or is interested in blogging.

It's working!

The Nov 30 meeting was a bit shambolic on account of the computer deciding to upload something, crash and then go through System Restore. Alaninbelfast had a wee 3g notebook with him which got us through some of the embarrassment of talking to people about how to set up a blog and not being able to show them much.
And there was me trying to impress Tara West and Ruth Jackson!
Icedcoffee and Filmplicity turned up and Icedcoffee made a case for using hosted Wordpress instead of the free version.
The big choice for starters is whether to use Wordpress or Blogger. There are other options too, like Tumblr and Posterous. I like Blogger - which this site is on - because it allows the embedding of code for audio and video that may be hosted on other free sites, while free Wordpress rejects most of it, though it allows Youtube.

A beginner on Wordpress may get ambitious later on and find s/he can't post items that are hosted elsewhere. I have found ways round this for audio, using plugins, but I love doing slideshows with Soundslides and I can't post them there.

But I think Icedcoffee is right and that's the way I have gone in setting up a new site for the Writer in Residence position at QUB. I picked the domain name first, bought it from the host I use for The Street and ArtsTalk and then set up a site with Wordpress. The host is JustHost which allows unlimited space.

The new site is The Writer's Log.

Anyway, the next meeting of Blog Standard will be on December 14. I'll have more details before that. I will also post information to my facebook page.