It's our BBA blog!

Hi Helen, I'm a techno-idiot so I can't answer your question about the virus, but I have a suggestion which might alleviate your manpower problem. You could invite people (students, faculty or staff) to guest blog on the bba blog, so you don't have to stress over so many entries.

Thanks Xing. I did try to invite all to "guest star" on the blog... You know what to do... ;-)

Hi Helen,

No worries about blog virus- I have not heard of anything like that before. :) There are 2 major concerns in maintaining blogs though:

1. Blog comment spams - Which is the problem that you are facing now. The growth in the usage of blogs recently have made them popular spam targets. Most blogging software actually can filter out these comments quite easily - I'm not sure which blog software we use - So I can't advice too much on it.

2. I understand it's not easy for you to maintain our BBA blog because you still have your work commitments. Opening up access to the blog is not impossible, but we definitely have to enlist the help of the IT unit to set up various permissions for different level of users (For example, some users can only post/edit post but not delete any post, whether all posts need to go through your approval before they are published etc).

What I would advice is perhaps to select BBA students/lecturers of diversified interests to be able to login and post entries. I think Prof Quek is a pretty good writer who delivers quite interesting view points. Try enticing him to be one of the BBA blog author perhaps? So we have perhaps Kimberly who blogs on her Vietnam trip, Reginald who blogs on his competitions etc. (lol - Having fun shooting arrows). Anyway if you look at a good example of a community blog, try looking at <a href = "http://www.theappleblog.com/">the Apple blog </a> and how their blog <a href = "http://www.theappleblog.com/authors/"> authors are featured. </a>

Looks like you have your hands full with the conflicting "open-or-close" blog debate. I shall lessen your headache there. =)

I dun have any problems moderating my comments, in fact I do not moderate at all as the Wordpress platform has an intrinsic spam-trapping feature. I never moderated too with the Google Blogger platform used by Xing. Too bad NUS IT personnel are bound by Microsoft systems. ;)

Bjorn confirmed my suspicion- I was wondering why this blog was set up using ASP.

Hmm Bjorn... There are Linux machines in SOC, so not all NUS IT personnel are bounded by Microsoft. It's the NUS non-IT personnel that are bounded by them.