Science Jobs Blog

Blogging For a Job

Welcome to the World of Weblogs, Syndication, Aggregators and RSS Feeds!

What's a Blog then?

A blog is a web page made up of short, frequently updated posts that are arranged in date order. They are used for a variety of purposes from personal diaries to news releases, rather like instant messages to the web. The pundits are suggesting this will be 'the next big thing on the net'. Anybody can have one - www.blogger.com. Our blog is here www.seltekconsultants.co.uk/sciencejobsblog.html, and new jobs will be posted as soon as we receive them.

You already have a latest jobs page, why do you need a blog as well?

Having a blog enables me to create an RSS feed. With freely available software (news aggregators) you can pick up this RSS feed and be notified about jobs as soon as they become available. You can also use this very same software for collecting many other RSS feeds, the BBC for example provides an excellent NEWS feed!

So where can I get this software?

There are several options available for download from the internet, some you have to pay for and some are free. Here are links to the websites of two FREE readers I've tried:

http://www.rssreader.com
http://www.awasu.com

I'm not suggesting these are the best available but I have tried them both and they seem to work well. You can find information on other packages available at Google.

So now what?

Once you've downloaded and installed your chosen software package simply visit our blog page http://www.seltekconsultants.co.uk/sciencejobsblog.html and look for the site feed link. This links to a web address that won't look that pretty in your browser. But just copy the address, open your aggregator and add a new channel pointing to that address. Actually to save you visiting the web page - here's the address for our Atom feed http://www.seltekconsultants.co.uk/rss/sciencejobs.xml

Alternatively Yahoo and MSN now provide the facility to import these feeds into your personal home page. So if you have an account with either of these service providers click on the appropriate icon on our blog.

OK, I'd like to set this up but my eyes must have glazed over at the important bit because I still can't get it to work!

Seltek Consultants Ltd 25a Hockerill Street Bishop's Stortford Hertfordshire CM23 2DH UK Tel: 01279 657716 Fax: 01279 651119 sales@seltekconsultants.co.uk