Rural Round-up: David Hogg on RuralGP.com
This month, David Hogg, a rural GP from the Isle of Arran, Scotland and tells us about his innovative website RuralGP.com
The website
RuralGP.com was launched in 2009, in a bid to provide a signpost for UK rural practice. Since then, it has grown from strength to strength, such that in 2016 there were 96,000 site visits, 484,000 page views and 1.8 million hits... and for the techy folk, this amounted to 76GB of data requested. With latest figures, it is forecast that visits will reach over 120,000 in 2017.
The aim of the site is to network and embrace rural general practice - and whilst there has been an inevitable Scottish focus (as I am currently writing most of the material) I am keen to feature any material relevant to international rural practice. The site is owned by me, the server costs paid by the Rural GP Association of Scotland, and as a result articles can be quickly turned around. The site is hosted with an excellent service provider, and using the Wordpress platform means that lots of advanced and helpful features can be incorporated - there is a wealth of plugins to aid site functionality.
I would be happy for anyone to submit content to the site. Logins can be set up so that you can write the material directly to the website (this is no more difficult than writing an email online) and authorship control measures mean that articles can be submitted easily for quick review, before they are published. You can publish under your own avatar/biography too. Adding images, video and podcasts is very straightforward, and new articles are automatically tweeted out. A weekly newsletter auto-publishes and at present we have over 120 subscribers.
If you think that RuralGP.com could be helpful to publicise your innovative work or event, let me know by emailing
david@ruralgp.com or tweeting to @RuralGP. You may also be interested in
RuralGP.scot too where we feature the work of the Rural GP Association of Scotland.
David Hogg
@davidrhogg
Rural GP,
Isle of Arran, Scotland