Our CNO at work is interested in creating a blog here at work to write about the happenings, planning, and future of nursing at our facility. YIPPEE!!! I’m so excited that someone on our executive wants to start doing this.
Now the question arises how to help facilitate this request. We have an intranet that apparently does have blogging capabilities….if you buy the module. We haven’t and currently won’t be making any extra purchases right now. I placed a query out to my Twitter friends to see if any of their CEO’s blog. The limited consensus that was shared with me is that a few do, but they are indeed only privately shared.
I assume I will be advising my CNO that she too (and I’m assuming this will be her intention) is to keep her postings private to the staff. That eliminates some of the free blogging tools such as Blogger (what I use) and WordPress. Out intranet is limited into what we can add to it. I suppose I could chat with IT about what options I could import in, but who really wants to go that route if they don’t need to.
So, now I must become creative with the way we organize and use our pages on our intranet to create a pseudo-blog for her to post her messages. Here’s my solution:
It doesn’t typically look like a blog does, but it has all the elements. There is a breakdown by month and then individual postings within that month. The only true issue I see is that they are not in reverse chronological order. That is the most recent post first. That is easily changed by shuffling pages on the back end of the system (where the content is truly created), but it does add new pages (posts) in as last one posted, last one displayed. This I’ll have to chat with her about to see if she is willing to do the manipulating needed to get the format truly looking like a blog.
The backside of the system looks like this:
Where across the top you can see how many pages deep I have navigated to get to a place to enter a posting. The listings of postings (or actual web pages) looks like this:
It’s certainly a little trickier then using blogger to post items to, but the idea is relatively the same. So with a little trickery and making the most of the tools you do have access too, it’s interesting to see what you can create when you’re in need and limited.
I’d be interested to see other work-arounds that perhaps you have come up with to solve needs like this with limited resources. Please feel free to share your creative solutions.
It might be worth checking w/ your IT peeps about installing WordPress on one of your servers. It’s a pretty small footprint and really easy if you can get the right access to a server. Good luck.