New Delivery service for ALERTnews

All new posts on the ALERTnews blog such as this one, will now be sent to subscribers' email via Feedblitz instead of Bloglet. I know that sounds like techno-gibberish, and you probably won't notice much of a difference but you should watch for the change and make sure posts send via Feedblitz are not being filtered as junk mail.

Why the change? To ensure greater reliability; Bloglet hasn't been working for the last few weeks and it's on its way out. I'll let the creator of Bloglet explain more:

Bloglet began as a hobby of mine to help manage the random blogs I'd read on a
daily basis. This was back when words like "blog" and "rss" had yet to enter most people's vocabulary. Now "blogs" are being mentioned on the Daily Show, but
Bloglet still remains a hobby. It's obvious that I don't have the time to turn
this hobby into something that offers a fair level of service to users. On the
other hand, Phil and the team over at Feedblitz has been doing a great job
building their blog-to-email product into a viable service. They've even built a Bloglet-to-Feedblitz converter. I recommend that any current users of Bloglet give them a try. In the meantime, I will leave Bloglet up and working as is, without any support. I'd like to phase it out slowly over the next few weeks.

If you are not a subscriber and you'd like to stay up-to-date with ALERTnews using Feedblitz, simply enter your name in the subscription box in the right margin of this page. Current subscribers can also manage subscriptions here.

You are ALERT!

During reading break, I'll be contacting all library staff to review the ALERTnews blog and Bloglet subscription tool. If you are reading this in your email you have covered at least one of the things I wanted to check! Here is the complete list:

Find ALERTnews online at http://alertnews.blogspot.com/
Subscribe to ALERT news via bloglet (home and twu account)
Know how to
use comments (Please add a comment to this post.)
Would it be helpful for
you in your ERT position to be able to post articles? (I can set you up as a
contributor.)
Review the links; in the event of a disaster they would carry pertinent local information.

I look forward to touching base with you briefly in the next few days.

Bloglet keeps ERT up to date with ALERTnews

Members of Alloway Library's Emergency Response Team can now stay up-to-date with news and information related to disaster recovery efforts using a neat little application called Bloglet.

A subscription service, Bloglet keeps track of the ALERTnews blog and then sends an email to a subscriber's email accounts if anything new has been posted to ALERTnews in the past 24 hours.

Combining Bloglet, ALERTnews and a personal email account means that even if a disaster affected TWU's computer servers, Library staff can still stay up-to-date with recovery efforts by reading ALERTnews on Blogger and watching for updates sent to a non-twu account, such as Hotmail, Shaw or Telus email.

Blog or email? part 2

I think the blog is useful for providing information to the public as well. But would the public just want important info via the library homepage? In a disaster situation, would it be best to have current info in the most easily accessible spot? I do think the blog would be great for ongoing, quick updates of progress, and the whole recovery process. Because you can access past blogs, the public could get a complete picture of what has been going on. I do think that one great benefit is how easy it is for staff to access and add comments to.

Blog or email?

OK, so which is preferable? A blog or communication via email?

I think email is the way to go for internal communcation, using the library staff group to get everyone. The blog is useful for public communication-- something the PR coordinator could use. It would be linked to the disaster response site.

What do you think? Use the comment button below.

Sample post

While the library is closed, we have received the OK from student life to move the reference collection to the Pacific Rim Collegium. Ron and Ted and 3 of our volunteers will start this on Thursday. The goal is to have all the undamaged ref material accessible by Monday morning.
Security will change the locks today so only library staff have access to the building.
Contacts Ken Kush at Student life and Andy Doerksen at Security.

Use the comment link to make a comment?