AEngD website update

Regular visitors to the AEngD website may know that we have been experiencing sporadic problems with its performance, with some pages being slow to load, or sometimes not loading at all (we noted this in May too).

We are now undertaking a major overhaul. The site is to be moved to a new hosting provider, the supporting content management system will be updated, and - once the migration and update are tested and found to be working satisfactorily - we will be fixing various minor issues relating to how some information is currently processed and displayed.

In the meantime, there may be occasional outages as we undertake this work, for which we apologise in advance, and we will keep users updated via Twitter, Facebook and this blog.

More EngD bloggers and websites

The AEngD steering committee met yesterday at Reading University and during a discussion of various aspects of the web, PR man Paul Wilkinson highlighted the launch of this blog and its 'blog-roll' feature.

Since that meeting, a few more blogs have been identified. For example, Paul Jeffrey of the STREAM IDC sent details of three water-related sites:

• Jo-fai Chow's 'Blend it like a Bayesian!'
• Jack Bloodworth's 'Catchment Jack'
• Ben Ward's Integrated Infrastructure ​Asset Management

(Ben's isn't, strictly, a blog - Wix sites are more websites than blogs and so don't have the RSS update capabilities of blogs. Updates won't appear in the listing, but it's well worth a look.)

If you have a blog related to your EngD research, please let us know and we can share it with other people in the EngD community.

AEngD bloggers and Tweeters

EngD research engineers are often keen to share their ideas online, so we have started to collate a list of blogs that relate to all aspects of EngD research.

Some blogs have been created by industrial doctorate centres (the Technologies for Sustainable Built Environments centre at University of Reading, for example), while others have been created by REs. For instance, the TSBE blog links to two further examples created by Reading REs involved in research into renewables:

• Marek Kubik writes about his research and, in his own words "frequently ventures into territories such as engineering, economics and politics. The occasional escapade off topic into things that interest me might also find its way in here."
• Peter Burgess's Set in Etch-a-Sketch covers his "views on all things renewable and sustainable energy."

Twitter also provides some useful links to EngD bloggers. @The_AEngD currently follows several REs who resort to 140 characters, some of whom write substantially more on their blogs. For example...

• Maria Felice is a mechanical engineering-focused research engineer at the Systems IDC at University of Bristol.
• Laura Daniels' Energy Assortment is a recently re-started blog by another RE at TSBE in Reading
• Mesut Pala is researching construction supply chains at Loughborough's CICE (though it appears his blog has been neglected of late, and has no RSS feed)
• Ben Betts is Stoatly Different, and is a RE at Warwick's International Digital Lab.

Please let us know if you have an EngD-related blog that you'd like to be added to our AEngD blog-roll.