Staying in touch with the NatSIP Website A quick 2½ minute roundup on some new ways you can stay in touch with what’s going on on the NatSIP Website… Steve J NatSIP Web Techie

Survey of NatSIP website users in January 2014 621 invitations, 175 reactions Most people said information was useful Many comments about staying in touch This has come out of a survey we did in Jan 2014 – where we targeted people who don’t use the site 95% of respondents said that what was on the site was useful Many people said that what would help would be things to make it easier to stay in touch with what was going on on the site…

We listened to you! Four new ways to stay in touch: RSS Feed Follow us on Twitter Find us on Facebook Sign up for an e-mail digest We listened. In the next two minutes, I’ll go through 4 new things we’ve added to the site to make it easier to stay in touch with what’s going on… All of the things we’ve added are things that have been suggested by site users:

RSS Feed Use with your favourite RSS reader: Digg, Feedly, Microsoft Outlook, etc., First, we’ve added an RSS feed to the site. RSS stands for really simple syndication, and you can use a feed reader (sometimes called an RSS reader) to keep track of what’s new on many sites at once. The NatSIP RSS feed button is in the top RH of the site front page, and you can use the feed with whatever your favourite reader is: Digg, Feedly, or even Microsoft Outlook…

Follow us on Twitter: The second thing, if you are a member of the twitterati, you can now follow us on Twitter. We tweet every time we add a new article to the site. Our Twitter name as you can see on the screen is @NatSIPUK Use your favourite twitter client to follow us on your PC or on your smartphone or ipad.

Find us on Facebook: If you’re a Facebook use, you can also find us on Facebook. Our page is called The National Sensory Impairment Partnership, and we update it every time we put a new article on the site. Add us to your timeline, or like us, and you’ll be notified whenever anything new happens. Again, you can use a PC, or an app on smartphones and tablets.

Sign up for an e-mail digest X You won’t receive it unless you ask for it. What is it? A regular, personalised e-mail summarising new stories on the NatSIP website Our fourth new thing is that you can now sign up for a regular e-mail digest… As it says on the slide, you need to ask for it – we have no intention of spamming anyone. Some of you may be on the HoSS Forum, which you can get in two forms, either a blow-by-blow e-mail-by-email update, where everyone gets an e-mail every time there is posting, or a digest, less frequent, but with all the new postings summarised in it. We’ve chosen to follow this second model – we’re offering a regular digest e-mail for the NatSIP website.

How do I get it? How do I sign up, I hear you cry? If you log in to the website (register if you need to…) you’ll see a new option on the User Menu on the left of the main page – Email digest settings. Click on this, and ….

Tick to sign up… You’ll see that there is only one digest you can sign up for. Click in the box to subscribe, and more options will appear…

Choose frequency and categories (optional) You can choose the frequency – how often we mail you. Weekly, fortnightly, monthly – we don’t want to flood your inbox The weekly (default) is probably the best to start with You can also select the article categories that you want to be notified about. Again, the default (all categories) is probably sensible… Then click on save preferences…

All done! The blue bar shows that your preferences have been saved. One frequency period later, you’ll get your first digest by email. If you signed it for a weekly digest, you’ll get it in a week’s time. If fortnightly, in a fortnight’s time, and so on…

What will I get? First e-mail will have appx 20 of the most recent articles and stories Second e-mail will only have things added since last e-mail, and so on The first digest will have the most recent 20 or so articles in it. The second one (a week later) will only have new articles since the previous digest, and so on. We also filter articles we tell you about according to your category preferences (if you’ve set them).

Help us improve the web portal If you are interested in joining a small group to help us improve the NatSIP website, send an e-mail to: webgroup@natsip.org.uk Finally, we’re looking to set up a small Special Interest Group to work with me (Steve) on developments on the portal. In the past, some of you have kindly said that you’d be interested in helping with this work. If that’s you, please could you send an e-mail to webgroup@natsip.org.uk so we can gather names and e-mail addresses of those interested? Thanks.