Nerds of Steel – what to’s and how to’s

by James Moss on January 8, 2008

in Using NOS

Welcome to Nerds of Steel. Have a good look round. This post will tell you about a few of the things you can do on and with the site and how you can do them. It’s written for the many who have no experience of blogs, so, if you’re an old hand, be patient.

Nerds of Steel (or NoS) is a website structured in the form of a blog – short for weblog. A blog is basically a way to manage and organize content in a website efficiently. It’s easy for us to post, link, and add different media formats including spreadsheets, presentations, PDF files, audio and video files. And it’s easy for you to read, watch and listen to posts, download files, receive posts via a reader (see below) or via email; share them with other people who you think would be interested (click the Share This link under any post) and search for specific things you’re interested in. If you sign in (for free), you can also comment on posts and access more data on the data page

The basic organization schema for a blog is anti-chronological. In other words, every post (like this) has a date and the presentation of the posts on the home page and in categories is from most recent to least recent. But the calendar doesn’t have to dominate the blog and it doesn’t here. You can find posts grouped by ‘category’ shown in the sidebar to the right or in the footer to the left. And you can find posts related to each other by clicking on one of the tags – also in the sidebar to the right. Tags or keywords are added to the post when they are first written to make related posts easier to find. The tag cloud to the right is a visual index showing keywords that are used most often bigger and bolder than keywords used less often. 

You can find posts by a particular author by clicking on their name wherever it appears in the blog or in the footer; and you can find posts in a monthly archive also accessed from the footer of each page. Finally, you can also use the search box in the upper right hand corner to look for anything else that might be here.

What to’s?

So what’s Nerds of Steel good for? NoS is meant to help you understand and think about the steel industry and being successful in it. It’s meant to help you in the same way that it helps us gather and use the raw materials for developing strategy. The items we post here are things that either help us know, analyze and understand what’s going on in the steel industry, spark our thinking or amuse us. We intend this to become a resource that will also help you understand what’s going on or provide you with links to resources and sources that can. 

So you can use NoS to browse through and look for things about the steel industry that you need in your work or your research.  You can see what we’re thinking about on the Articles page where we post our thoughts on issues that we think are of strategic importance to the industry.  You can look for news stories in News or you can follow steel stocks and financials news in Finance. There are links to data and data sources on the Data page.

How to’s ?

The easiest way to find our content is to come to the site, but you don’t have to. Though you do have to visit the website to enjoy the deeper content, you don’t have to visit just to get an update on what we’ve posted. Blogs, like many of your favorite news sources, can be read remotely. New posts can be sent to you via email or to your ‘news reader’. A news reader gathers the output from the blog periodically (when there’s something new to gather) and brings it to you. You can use any number of readers such as BlogLines or Google Reader . You sign up to receive our posts in your reader by pushing this button  rss-icon.jpg either right here or in the blog header or wherever you see it. That will take you to a page where you will be guided through the sign up process. (It will also give you more options for ‘readers’). 

If you prefer, you can get the content via email. Just click on the envelope in the header and that will help you sign up to receive an email update whenever there’s something new to look at. Don’t worry, we do not give your email to anyone.

If you want to have access to more content or if you want to be able to comment on a particular post or the site in general, you should sign up by clicking the link in the sidebar on the far right. Signing up will not trigger getting the feed to your reader or getting updates via email.  It will just sign you up as a subscriber to the blog and you will be able to see more content and make comments. Once you’ve signed in, you don’t have to sign out again unless you’re on someone else’s or a public computer.

So go on, sign up (for free) and comment away. We’d love to have you as a subscriber and hear what you have to say. Besides, if you have any questions that aren’t answered here, (and you’re signed in) you can leave them in the comments below and we’ll answer them for you.