The Integrated Lab is built on WordPress and is therefore a ‘blogging’ site, but its use is not just to elicit opinion and comment, but to incorporate reference material by means of very short ‘blogs’ that cross-link to other useful on-line resources. The key to this is good categorisation, and good tagging. There is no intention to compete with any other websites, most of which are more focussed around specific laboratory technologies, but to provide a hub, or starting point for anyone who cares about laboratory integration to find relevant and useful information.
Finding information
The most recent posts appear and the top of the home page. These gradually get shunted down as new material arrives. In order to find older information there are 5 options.
- Use the search box on the right hand side of the page; type in your search term and click the magnifying glass.
- Use the Calendar immediately below the search box. If you allow the cursor to hover over a date, you can see the title of posts made on that day. Click the date and the posts will be displayed. Select the month in the small panel immediately below the calendar to see posts from that month.
- Use the Archives box on the left hand side of the page to select posts made in a specific month.
- Click one of the categories in the list on the left hand panel to see all entries assigned to that category
- Click one of the tags in the tag cloud in the left hand panel to see all entries assigned to that tag.
Contributing to the site is quite straightforward, and there is lots of on-line help; this tutorial is just one example.
Subscribing
You can keep up to date with new posts and comments on The Integrated Lab in different ways.
- By entering your email address in the ‘Subscribe by Email’ box in the right-hand sidebar, and clicking Go, you will be taken through a simple registration process in order to receive an email containing new posts and comments.
- If you use a feed reader, you can subscribe to the Posts and Comments RSS feeds by clicking the appropriate icons in the right-hand sidebar.
- If you access The Integrated Lab through a mobile phone, the content will be formatted in a way to facilitate reading on a small sceen.
- You can also follow The Integrated Lab (integratedlab) on Twitter.
