- Job Adverts
- Cynics Guide: Psychiatric Hotline Protocol
- Define My Madness ?
- You Don’t Have To Be Mad, But It Helps
- Better Than Butlins ?
- Stop In The Name Of My Law !
- Sectioning Detrimental To Self Esteem
- Avoiding Becoming A Patient
- Cynics Guide: Staff Retention (Part 1)
- [Cynic's Guide: How To Blog]
- Major And Minor Psychoneurotics
- Cynic’s Guide: Not Taught At University
- You know you’re an RMN when…
- A Glossary of terms
- Cynic’s Guide: How To Be An Antipsychiatrist
- The Devil’s Dictionary (Mental Nurse Edition)
- Students Guide to Acute Inpatient Wards
- ABC: A to C
- ABC: D to F
- ABC: G to I
I was recently asked how to set up a blog. In particular an anonymous work blog. I’ve decided to answer by discussing my experiences and attempt a guide, with links, that you will hopefully find useful.
When I started mentalnurse I was in a job far far away in another speciality. I was frustrated at the time by the dissonance between the ideals of mental health nursing (compassion, helping, doing good, improving lives, empowering etc) and the blocks to meeting the ideal (management, tabloid readers, management, finance, government guidelines, my own inability etc). I thought this would give me plenty of things to write about.
There also seemed to be an imbalance. There were, and are, many many blogs written by service users. Many of these I felt gave an unbalanced view of mental health services. Maybe not untrue, or unfair, but out of context and very very subjective. There were few blogs written from the system’s side of things. Plenty of information resource type sites. But very medical and dry. Few with any personality 
I also had only limited time left on the domain. Blogging would be just the things to waste the last couple of months of the time remaining. No one would ever find it or read it !
I was also interested by the technical challenge of doing it.
Having read a lot of other work based blogs, particularly those by policepersons, I thought there was a niche community for me to fit into.
I was a bit concerned about the ethics of it. But I felt that as I was working for the public as part of the NHS there was probably a valid interest in what mental health nurses did. As long as I kept it anonymous and didn’t give away any secret passwords or handshakes !
This quote stuck in my from from The Magistrate
This blog is anonymous, and Bystander’s views are his and his alone. Where his views differ from the letter of the law, he will enforce the letter of the law because that is what he has sworn to do. If you think that you can identify a particular case from one of the posts you are wrong. Enough facts are changed to preserve the truth of the tale but to disguise its exact source.
That’s what I would do. I would change major and minor details of my stories. I discussed entries with other nurses and made sure what I discussed was fairly common. I took stories other people shared and pretended they happened to me. I’ve made up a few things here and there. I’ve taken multiple stories and joined them together in exciting and new ways: a mashup I think it is called. I would respond to any complaints quickly and responsibly.
That was the dream.
Here is my quote:
[True ?] Not in detail. All the stories are true in spirit. Opinions expressed may not be mine.
Don’t tell the people you work with that you blog. Have a cunning pseudonym.
I am fairly technical. This site was going to be a testing ground so I could set up a blog dealing with my real life, not mental health, interests. Something I never got round to in the end. If you are technical and understand things like PHP, FTP, SSH, Apache and general geekery this is not for you. You already know everything you need to know.
I suggest if you want to set up a fairly anonymous blog you either use
or
wordpress (my favourite)
They both promise to let you set up a blog that would be reasonably anonymous. Certainly as long as you don’t give away personal info you should be fine unless someone unleashes serious legal action against you.
I would imagine if you have something to say that would result in this kind of action you are better going to someone in real authority instead of blogging about it.
If you have a desperate need for increased security these two articles may be useful.
How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else)
Blogs are like personal telephone calls crossed with newspapers. They’re the perfect tool for sharing your favorite chocolate mousse recipe with friends–or for upholding the basic tenets of democracy by letting the public know that a corrupt government official has been paying off your boss.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently posted an excellent guide to safe blogging. While the guide is quite rich in tips to ensure you don’t reveal too much personal information while blogging, it doesn’t look very closely at the technical issues associated with keeping a blog private. I decided to write a quick technical guide to anonymous blogging, trying to approach the problem from the perspective of a government whistleblower in a country with a less-than-transparent government.
WordPress and Blogger both allow you to set up a blog fairly quickly and easily with a minimum of technical knowledge. I would suggest setting up a dummy blog. Play around with it, learn to write some posts, make comments, see how it looks, roam the Internet and read other blogs, find ones you like and link to them. If they like the look of you they may even link back.
Links are the lifeblood of blogs. The more shared links the better if you want popularity. Blogs of a feather link together.
Join communities and find blog directory sites, add your site. They will help drive up awareness, and if you have a blog it is a given you want someone to read it.
Blogwise
BritBlog
How to write for blogs.
I have no idea 
I just churn out what thoughts pop into my head. My titles rarely have anything to do with the subject of the post. My entries are long rambling and incoherent. I often lose my way when in the middle of an entry. I’ve often told I am at least as aggravating and insulting as I am funny. A big dose of Ego gives me motivation.
Read blogs you like. Copy their ideas, attribute the source. Encourage community; respond to people that leave comments, visit their blogs, leave them comments.
Here are some links.
Top 10 Tips on Promoting Your Blog
For mental health nurses or students this site is always an option to host your blog.
I am more than willing to provide some technical support to nurses and students wanting to set up a blog.
Please get in touch if you want to know more.
To Be Final Version Of This Article Here
The biggest concern I have is confidentiality – anonimity was another, but when my blog was on blogger with no identifying names a lecturer at UWE who I had never met managed to identify me.
To maintain confidentiality I post about the issues, not precise conditions. Names, locations and dates all get changed – a post might say something happened yesterday, whereas it may be weeks or months previously. I feel I am posting entirely anonimised articles, unless of course someone from my ward happens across the blog, in which case they may recognise the situation.
I would have thought that naming your university was asking for possible identification
What was the response of the lecturer ?
I would like to thank the person who thought he or she would try to expose my real name on Mental Nurse. As well as throw me a few insults. All domain names, like mentalnurse.org, are registered in a big database, with the name of the person who registered it. This, quite rightly, is publicly available. Knowing this I had someone else register the mentalnurse site in their name. Presuming it would never be popular enough for it to matter.
Sadly this person got very upset when I told him what had occurred. I was asked to remove the name. The registrant name has been changed to someone I do not even know and has no connection with mental health nursing in any way, shape or form.
As this happened just after we got mentioned in the Britmeds I suspect it was someone that came to the site via NHSBlogDoc and thought they would cause trouble.
This sadly has led to a delay in one of Z’s posts, which has now been posted.
There is little point in attempted exposure. Most of the stories I post under the Mental Nurse name either come from other people or are not based on actual specific events.
I do not think NHSBogDoc had anything to do with this at all. But every time Mental Nurse gets a little popularity boost the Trolls come a lurking.
Just thought I would try to explain why people say a post vanish before their eyes some weeks ago.
Mental