Blog

Your blog is a dated journal on your member profile: notes on what you are working on, results, opinions, anything you want to publish under your own name. Other members can comment on your entries, and you decide for each entry whether anyone, only logged-in members, or only you can read it.

It suits work that accumulates in order. A postdoc writes a short entry each week — what she ran, what came out, what she is trying next — and by the end of a project the blog is the lab notebook, dated, searchable, and readable by whoever she lets read it. A group blog does the same job for a group's meeting notes.

A blog is not a discussion and not a publication. You write, other people comment; if you want an argument with peers, that is the forum, and if you want a citable, versioned, reviewed record of a result, that is a publication. Nothing in a blog is reviewed, and nothing about it is permanent — you can delete an entry.

There are three blogs on a hub, all built from the same component:

• Your blog, at https://<your hub>/members/<your ID>/blog, reached from the Blog tab on your profile.
• A group blog, at https://<your hub>/groups/<group>/blog, reached from the Blog tab inside a group.
• The site blog, at https://<your hub>/blog, written by hub staff.

Depending on how your hub configures the site blog, it may show only its own entries or pull in member and group entries as well.

Your blog page

The Blog tab lists your entries newest first. Each one shows its title, its entry number, the date and time it was published, its author, and either the number of comments on it or Comments off. Below that comes an excerpt — the first 300 characters or so of the entry. On your own entries you also see the privacy level and Edit and Delete links.

A search box at the top finds entries by title and text. The sidebar has Entries By Year, which drills down to a year and then a month, and Popular Entries, the five entries with the most views. When feeds are turned on, an RSS Feed link beside the heading gives you the feed for whatever you are looking at, including a single month.

If your blog is empty, you see a short introduction instead of the list, explaining what a blog is and inviting you to press New entry.

Two buttons sit at the top of your own blog: New entry and Settings. They do not appear on anyone else's blog.

Writing an entry

Follow the postdoc's Friday entry the whole way. She is on her profile, on the Blog tab, and presses New entry at the top of the page. The form asks for:

Field	Notes
Title	Required.
Entry	Required. The body of the post, in the editor.
Uploaded files	An uploader for images and attachments. Choose a file and press Upload; the list above shows what you have already uploaded, each with a delete link. Reference the files from the entry text with the hub's content macros.
Tags	Optional, comma-separated — for example negf theory, ion transport. Tags connect your entry to everything else on the hub with the same tag.
Allow comments	Checked by default. Uncheck it to close the entry to comments.
Privacy	Public (anyone can see), Registered members, or Private (only I can see).
Start publishing	When the entry becomes visible. Leave blank to publish now.
End publishing	When the entry stops being visible. Leave blank for no end. Format both as YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss.

Press Save. You land on the finished entry, at a permanent address built from its publication date and title, such as /members/1042/blog/2026/09/my-first-results.

Hers is titled "Week 14: bias sweep reruns", set to Registered members so it stays inside the hub, tagged negf theory, with the week's plots uploaded through Uploaded files and referenced from the entry text. The address it gets is the one she pastes into the group's Friday email.

To change an entry later, open it or find it in the list and press Edit. The same form comes back with everything filled in.

Deleting an entry

Press Delete on an entry. A confirmation page warns that the entry and all its comments are about to go, with a Yes, I want to delete this entry checkbox. Tick it and press Delete.

Settings

Settings on your own blog controls your feeds:

• RSS Feed of entries — enabled or disabled.
• The length of RSS feed entries — Full or Partial, a 300-character excerpt.

Privacy is not a setting here; it belongs to each entry.

That is worth knowing before you decide where notes live. The postdoc's registered-members entries are readable by anyone with a hub account, and invisible to her feed subscribers. If notes must stay inside a named set of people, they belong in a group or a project, not in a member blog.

Reading and commenting

An entry page shows the title, the entry number, the date and time, the text, and the entry's tags. Click a tag to find related content.

Where comments are allowed, they follow the entry as a threaded conversation. Each comment shows the commenter's picture and name — or Anonymous — with a permalink carrying the time and date, marked Edited if it has been changed since.

To add one, log in, write it in the form at the bottom, and press Submit. Tick Post anonymously to hide your name and picture from other readers. Guests see a note saying they must log in first.

On each existing comment you can:

• Reply — opens a form under that comment. Replies nest up to three levels deep; below that the Reply link stops appearing.
• Edit — on your own comments, and on any comment on your own blog.
• Delete — on comments on your own blog.
• Report abuse — files a support ticket about the comment. A reported comment stays in place but its text is replaced by a notice that it has been reported, until the hub's support staff deal with it.

Group blogs

A group blog is the one to reach for when the journal belongs to the work rather than to a person: a lab's meeting notes, a course's weekly announcements, a working group's progress log. It stays with the group when the person who wrote it moves on.

A group's blog works the same way as your own, but the group decides who may write in it. Group managers set that from the Settings button inside the group's Blog tab, choosing whether all members or managers only may post, along with the group blog's feed options. Whether the Blog tab shows at all, and who can read it, are group plugin settings a hub administrator controls.

Entries in a group blog belong to the group rather than to you, and the group's managers can edit and remove them.

The site blog

The site blog at /blog is the hub's own. You can read it, search it, subscribe to its feed, and comment on entries that allow comments, exactly as on a member blog. Writing to it needs a permission that ordinary members do not have; if your account has it, a New entry button appears there and the form works the same way.

See the Blogs chapter in the managers book for how a hub administrator configures all three.