Online support

A reminder that you can find a range of information from the e-Day workshops on the HIE website: http://www.hie.co.uk/e-communities-project.html. The latest updates include pages of links related to Alaistar's 3 workshops -

• generating an income from the web
• customise your website with free tools and resources
• online security.

This is the last entry I'll be making as e-Communities programme development officer, as the project has now come to an end. If you would like to see more e-Communities workshops or general ICT support for community groups, please contact your local CVS or contact HIE's strengthening communities group.

All the best
Claire

Using search engines to solve problems

Search engines can be useful tools for much more than finding a specific organisation or web site.

For example:
Do you ever get frustrated with trying to get office applications to do something out of the ordinary, such as running a mail merge or entering a table of contents? Sometimes I find the application's own 'help' function a bit confusing. A colleague has just given a great tip. Enter what you are trying to do into one of the search engines such as http://www.everyclick.com/ and you will find a host of advice and information from a wide range of sources. Often this will be presented in an easy-to-follow format written by someone else who has been in the same boat as you.

Many thanks to Jeralyn for this tip.

blogs 'n' wikis

I asked Maggie who ran the blogging and wiki workshops at e-Day to provide us with some links to some of the blogs you managed to set up. Here's what she sent me:

Some of my favourite blogs that were produced (in about 40mins each) can be found at
http://skyewards.blogspot.com/ includes text, a graphic, links and a voting form..and all relevant to the day too!
http://chmag08.blogspot.com/ has text graphics and comments from other delegates
http://sesam-flensburg.blogspot.com/ is from the international students and has a great profile including photos they had with them
http://chocholito.blogspot.com/ good fun and interesting exchange in comments
http://eday1skye-frogspawn.blogspot.com/ really relevant community blog starter

She has also given me links to a couple of wikis:

http://eday4.wiki.zoho.com/ about psychotic poodles(really) which is open for public comment.
http://eday7.wiki.zoho.com/Sabhal-Mor-Visit.html which includes links and uploaded files.

Hope you find these useful. We have also uploaded a number of resources from the workshops onto the HIE website - http://www.hie.co.uk/e-communities-project.html. Here you can also access the e-Communities study report plus John Watt's keynote presentation: e-Communties doing IT for themselves.

Spanglefish

Here's the link to the spanglefish site that was set up for Dave's workshop - the site is still live so feel free to play around with it: www.spanglefish.com/e-communitiesday

I believe some of you have even gone straight home to set up your own sites, please tell us how you get on and give us the links so we can come and visit!

e-distribution for news circulation

For those of you who participated in this workshop, and who would like to continue your learning journey or perhaps try it out with some of your group, go to http://www.learningcentres.org/e-day.html to play about with the google group. Here, you can also access the information for the "distance is no barrier for a group" workshop.

search for charity

A great tip that we picked up at e-Day! Instead of going to Google to search for websites, try making http://www.everyclick.com/ your homepage. Every time you click search a UK charity will benefit. You can register so that your chosen good cause benefits from this service. They claim to have raised over £400,000 so far.

Thanks to David for this tip!

eDay

Welcome to Maggie's blogger students this morning - hope you will all go home after today and set up your blog for your community group!

Our first ever e-Day has come and gone, thanks to everyone who attended and made the day such a success. We had some really positive feedback so far, with loads of ideas of how we might do things differently next time. Most importantly, everyone went away with some new information and we are expecting to see lots of new wikis, blogs and other community ICT projects appearing soon.

Good news for bloggers - recent research has shown that a mall amount of blogging every week can help you feel less isolated and more connected - visit http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/ to watch this week's programme.

We are always interested to hear your comments and questions about the e-Communities project and particularly if you came along to e-Day - post your comments and happy blogging!