Work blog: an interesting idea?

So some of you may know that I have, in working on my thesis research, abandoned the traditional idea of using a notebook to record everything I’ve been doing to record the progress of my research. This was done when my advisor recommended that I try using a very nice piece of software called MacJournal, from Mariner Software. This has the nice feature of allowing me to tag entries, much like a blog, and paste in plots effortlessly, organize things in a much better way, put in tables, make lists, copy and paste in emails, and that sort of thing. The software is of course useful for more than just scientific journal keeping, and is actually somewhat designed as a back end of blogging, so I could probably use it as my blogging interface and then just upload things to wordpress, for instance.

Anyway, lately I’ve become increasingly worried about the issue of backing up of things, though. Because of course the very nice thing about having things in a lab notebook is that they’re nice and solid. And a hard drive failure, or me dropping my laptop isn’t going to mean a massive loss of anything important. Of course all my actual scripts, data files and so on are stored on the computers here and are backed up frequently, but it would be a serious pain in the ass if I were to lose all the stuff from my MacJournal files.

So, the question that has arisen in my mind. Wouldn’t it be neat if I could use MacJournal as the blogging back end that it’s designed to be and keep all of my entries as a blog somewhere? Well, there are some problems with that. Like, I can’t really have it as a public blog for a variety of reasons. One main reason is that I don’t want it to be public because I can’t be publicly displaying CLEO results. Another is that I don’t want my intermediate stupid errors being shown in a public place. However, it would be awfully useful to have it be somewhere that I could tell my advisor to go look at it. The optimal thing would be to put it on the LEPP server in the “non-public” side, where only people who are members of the collaboration can look at it (because it’s password protected). So I guess what I have to do is to convince the computing group that they should allow me access to a mySQL database (of which I’m quite confident we have some here at the lab) so that I can run a wordpress blog for my analysis.

Or maybe this is totally crazy and nuts? I don’t know how much time and effort really goes into setting up a wordpress blog, for instance, or how much time and effort it would be to put all my old entries from MacJournal into it. But it seems like it would be really useful to be able to access it from any computer anywhere in the world, for instance, provided I had https. And of course this would eliminate all worries about backups because everything at the lab is backed up on a regular basis.