New Directions–Workplace Safety Store Blog

New Directions for the Workplace Safety Store Weblog

     One of our new year’s resolve for 2007 was to upgrade the Workplace Safety Store Weblog—give the blog a facelift, automate some of the news monitoring functions, and set guidelines that would facilitate the selection and the posting of useful and relevant news.

In February of this year, after a number of iterations, we finalized our working plan. The estimated time to complete the project was 3 weeks, and accordingly, work was scheduled to begin in March.

The major points of the plan were:

  • Upgrade to the latest version of WordPress
  • Select a theme that would provide a look and feel compatible with that of the store.

    When we started the blog we used the default Kubrick theme, which excellent as it is, proved to be difficult to modify to fit the presentation we wanted.

  • Install plugins to enhance the blogging platform.
  • Formulate a set of editorial policies and guidelines for posting content to the blog.
  • Streamline the news monitoring and gathering process. Automate as much as possible.

However as you may have noticed, what actually transpired was quite different. We are now at the end of May and the blog has been stagnant for a quite a while–no updates, no new entries, comments or posts–no nothing.

So, what happened? Well, instead of boring you with the tedious details, lets just say that it was a learning experience. The good news is that we now have a reasonably good working platform.

We are aware that the lack of postings does not make us look good in your eyes. We apologize for this, and having learned from the experience, we are determined not to let such a lapse happen again.

Our immediate goal is to bring the Labor Law Poster Updates & Compliance Charts up-to-date.

We have fallen behind on this much more than we had anticipated largely because the anticipated integration of the data acquisition side of things with the blogging platform is not working as well as planned. A significant portion of the work will have to done by hand. Please bear with us as we work on this.

The next order of the day is to comb through the postings and re-assign them to new categories. We will make the new categorization public after this task is completed, most likely early next week.

We look forward to bringing you interesting and relevant news related to workplace safety and regulatory compliance. Information we hope you will find useful in managing and enhancing health and safety programs in your organization.

Feel free to let us know what you think about our new blog. Please use the comment block below or send us your thoughts using the contact form. For comparison, this is what the blog looked like in its past life, courtesy www.archive.org.