Murdoch University Blogs

Should your blog be part of Murdoch Blogs?

It is not always sensible to host you blog on Murdoch Blogs. Sometimes it is essential that you do host it here. Below is an outline of when it makes sense and when it doesn’t.

WHEN NOT TO BLOG WITH MURDOCH BLOGS

1. Your blog is not just work/study related
2. You want ownership of it and to take it when you leave campus
3. You want to use the blog for “personal branding”.
4. The site is a “throw away” single use collaboration and you don’t mind the data being stored on a third party server
5. You want to share access with someone without a MAIS login
6. You want to customize the look and features more than the university can provide.

WHEN TO BLOG WITH MURDOCH BLOGS

1. You are required to use a blog as part of your job/study
2. Your data needs to be on University servers for ethical or business reasons
3. If the intellectual property created belongs to the university
4. If it is essential to have a murdoch.edu.au web address
5. If students need to access it without using up internet QUOTA
6. If you don’t have the skill or time to evaluate third party hosting options
7. You want to set it so that only someone with a MAIS login can read it
8. You want to use your MAIS login to access it
9. You want a system that *may* be able to integrate with other information systems of the University
10. The blog is not based on a specific Course Unit and the very basic blog facility of the Learning Management System is not sufficient
11. You are concerned about Terms of Service on third party sites

HOSTING OPTIONS

There are three places to host your blog:

1. On a third party “get a blog” service where blogs are set up and  maintained on a web site. These are good for the beginner blogger. You can make quite a few changes to the look and functions of the blog, but generally these more limited than if you hosted the blog yourself.

Useful sites to get a blog are:

• blogger
• wordpress.com
• edublogs.org

2. Buy web hosting and control your own installation. This is useful if you want to control all your data and customise your blog intricately. Many hosting services cost around $100 a year and have “one click” installations for blogs. You do have to have some technical knowledge.

3. Have your blog hosted by the University as part of Murdoch University blogs.