Tag: Reference blog

Yesterday I described how you can sign up to get blog posts delivered via email to you. One downside of the emails is that they only offer a snippet of the blog post; you have to click a link in the email to get to the full post on the web.

What if you wanted to have the full text of the blog post waiting for you in Microsoft Outlook? Having the full text also means that if you use the search feature in Outlook, it will find not only relevant emails but also blog posts. Here’s how you can set up the blog feed in Outlook if you’d rather get the posts that way.

Step 1: In Microsoft Outlook, click “RSS Feeds” in the left sidebar.

Step 2. Right mouse click to open the RSS Feeds menu.

Step 3: In the “New RSS Feed” box, copy and paste the blog feed URL and then click the “Add” button.

https://blogs.baruch.cuny.edu/newmanreference/feed/

Step 4. Click the “Advanced…” button.

Step 5: In the RSS Feed Options box, check the box for “Download the full article as an .html attachment” option and then click the “OK” button.

You should now see the blog posts in the “RSS Feeds” section of the Outlook interface.

Working with the Blogs@Baruch staff, we were able to set up the service again that lets you subscribe to blog posts here as they are published. On the right side of the blog, you’ll see a new “subscribe by email” box where you can enter your email address. Once you submit your address, look for a confirmation email message with a “confirm subscription” link in it that you need to click to complete the process.

The Blogs@Baruch team notified me this week that they needed to retire some of older WordPress themes, including the Freshy theme that had been in use for this blog and for the Newman Library Idea Lab blog. I switched the themes on this blog and the Idea Lab blog over to a couple of the Baruch-branded custom themes. If anyone else in the library wants to try out some of the dozens of other themes we have to choose from, be my guest; I can set you up with admin rights that will let you preview our blog in any of those themes.

When you log into the blog so you can write a new post, don’t be distracted by the “Quick Draft” box. Instead, use the “+ New” link in the top black nav bar instead:

 

At the moment, the Blogs@Baruch staff is reporting that the Quick Draft feature is broken anyway.

I’m interested in making this blog easier to use and am wondering if you have had any problems with finding posts on this blog. Was there a time when you were trying to find something that you were sure was here but then you couldn’t find it? If you have any stories like that or if you have have suggestions, just add a comment to this post.

At the moment, there are three main ways to find content on this blog.

Search

Link to the Search page can be found on the navigation bar:

 

When you run a search, results are sorted by relevancy, not by date. Also, if your search term is also a tag on the blog, the first item on the results page is probably a page indexing all the posts tagged with that word.

This search is powered by a Google Custom Search Engine that searches the posts from 2009-present that are on the current Blogs@Baruch site and from 2004-2009 on the older Blogspot site. Results of searches will include posts from both sites.

Tags

As you compose a blog post, you can add tags to enhance findability:

Feel free to add them as you write new posts.

Once a post is published, tags for it can be found at the bottom of posts:

 

In the Databases Overview page on the wiki, you may see that in many rows, there is a link in the last column for “Blog.” If you click that link, you’ll be taken to the index page on the blog for that database tag.

 

Archive

Today, there is a new “Archive” page on the blog with an index of all the blog posts since 2009. That’s all of the posts since we started using Blogs@Baruch. A link to the archive is  on the black navigation bar of the blog.