Blogging all over GridPP
Mon 2 Jul 2007
Over the last year, GridPP has been slowly but surely moving into the blog world. The latest step has come with the amalgamation of all GridPP's blogs onto one page, at http://planet.gridpp.ac.uk/ Links to the last three blog entries are also now available from the GridPP home page.
The Planet GridPP page is the brainchild of Andrew Elwell at Glasgow University. Andrew explains, "There are some excellent snippets of documentation, but you generally need to know where to find them. I'd rather have things centralised where I can get an instant overview of what's happening without having to visit several sites for news and seeing if other people are having the same issues."
Andrew adds, "The planetplanet software that runs the site is simple to extend to pick up any site that publishes information as RSS or Atom and can then act as an aggregated feed for upstream sites such as the GridPP home page."
Planet GridPP brings together technical blogs from all of GridPP's Tier -2s (LondonGrid, NorthGrid, ScotGrid and SouthGrid), alongside the GridPP operations and storage blogs, Steve Lloyd's ATLAS test blog (reported here recently) and Steve Traylen's blog from CERN. What is it about Steves and blogging?
The various blogs tell you what's going on around GridPP, from pictures of Oxford's computer room upgrade to the weather in Sheffield, as well as what's up and what's down at sites all around.
Jeremy Coles, GridPP's operations manager, explains how their blog came about, "Originally within the deployment team we used a series of weekly updated text report files. While these were useful, as soon as blogs became easy to implement and use it was obvious that they would provide a much better means of sharing information and knowledge. They have their own drawbacks but have proved to be extremely useful in helping us to track progress, problems and issues."
As well as the blogs reported on Planet GridPP, other GridPP members have blogs - some about work and some not. Andrew McNab's blog is about 'Grids, Webs, Security and other interesting stuff' (http://www.gridlock.org.uk/). In May, Dave Colling from Imperial College, Will Venters from LSE and Sarah Pearce joined other LCG members to blog from the EGEE User Forum about the presentations, who they met and where they ate dinner.
For a less work-oriented blog, try Neasan O'Neill's 'The guy you love to hate to love' (http://www.neasanoneill.com/) that details the heavy metal gigs he's been to recently, as well as his views on Wii games and what he's currently reading.
If you're a member of GridPP and you have a blog, let us know (http://www.gridpp.ac.uk/contact.html) and we'll list it here - or on Planet GridPP if it's work related.
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