Thursday, February 23, 2012

How to search for WOU blogs

Since Blogger is one of those weird services that's still not quite compatible with Google Apps, there's not an easy way to list blogs owned by others in our domain.  Not that I've yet found, anyway.

You can try Blogger Search, though; it's available in a bunch of different ways:

Some help is available at the Blog Search FAQ page, but it seems to be a bit outdated.
Currently, just searching for "mail.wou.edu" (our Google Apps domain name) doesn't get you much, but once more of us get active and start linking to each other, that should change. Right now it's probably best to search for a specific person's blog using "mail.wou.edu" and their name, like so:



This will search the contents of all publicly available entries in the Blogger system, so you'll probably also get results from outside WOU, but anything from the blog you're looking for should be near the top.


Now, I'm not sure why this search only returned one entry, since Nathan has more than that in his blog, but the important thing is that it gives the blog's address.
Later I'll post on how to add a blog to your blog's sidebar, or to the list of blogs in your dashboard.

Friday, February 17, 2012

February fun

And here I was going to get back to regular postings.  Well, it's still better than I was doing in the past.  More of us in UCS are blogging now, so I'll be adding links to their blogs as I get them.

The big news around here is that Brian Berkley left for another job.  He's been our Windows sysadmin for four years and leaves a big pair of boots to fill.  We'll have a hard time finding someone to equal his skills and dedication.  I can't blame him too much for leaving, though; with his new job he has a six minute commute, where it was over a half hour to here.  As someone who commuted for way too many years, I can testify that it's a huge relief to get that time back.