One of the most interesting elements of UMW Blogs is the way in which things kinda happen on their own accord, and the publishing environment takes on a life of its own. For example, I track a lot of the posts and comments that go through the system, and what I have begun to recognize is that clubs and organizations at Mary Washington are using this space to get their announcements out by using this system to create quick and easy websites with built-in syndication.

So, why not aggregate all the announcements into one space and make things easy for the community to discover, view, and subscribe to? Well, thanks to the wonders of RSS and a WordPress spam plugin it’s a cinch. Check out the UMW Clubs and Organizations blog, which features the latest posts from contributing clubs and organizations at UMW, along with a list of the contributing groups. Additionally, if any club or organization wants to add their site (which can be hosted on UMW Blogs or any other service with a feed), it’s a simple form to fill out to get their announcements syndicated into this site.

photo credit: Criterion

For the first part of this semester I was in over my head with UMW Blogs. We had come up with the idea (through covert communication with other schools not to be named ) to use FeedWordPress as a syndicating engine. Quite simply, that students create their own blogs and tag posts for their respective courses, which would automatically republish them in an aggregating course blog.

For example, Sue Fernsebner’s History 299 course would tag relevant posts 08fern299, and those posts would be automatically re-posted in the course blog. How are they re-posted automatically? Well, Donncha’s Sitewide Tags Pages plugin collects all posts, tags and categories into one blog  http://tags.umwblogs.org), that by extension gives a single feed for all tags through the WPMu environment. You can see all of professor Fernsebner’s class blog posts one that blog here: http://tags.umwblogs.org/tag/08fern299/
And if you just smack the term “feed” at the end of the above URL you then have an RSS feed for every post in UMW Blogs that has the tag 08fern299: http://tags.umwblogs.org/tag/08fern299/f…
Now, FeedWordPress just consumes this feed and republishes all the distributed posts in one blog and allows the permalink to point back to the students original blog post on their blog. Perfect, right?

Well, almost. Fact is that the .2.x version of the Sitewide Tags was not actually working with FeedWordPress that well. What was happening was that FeedWordPress was not updating correctly and the permalinks would only point to the post on the course blog, effectively erasing the link back to the student blog. The only way to fix this was to go into the course blog and delete the posts that didn’t link back to the student blog, and update the feed again which works when you manually pull the feed but not when it is automatically pulled in (which was the root of the problem). Well, this issue is no more, the latest version of Donncha’s Sitewide Tags Pages plugin 0.3.1 fixes the issue with FeedWordPress and has put UMW Blogs back in the Syndicating cloud (I was worried there for a second, and I don’t miss all the duct tape fixes at all).

The moral of the story? It didn’t take long for the WPMu community to make things right, and it didn’t cost UMW anything but a little bit of experimentation, patience, and sharing. I mean who’s afraid of the open source wolf? These times demand many things, and one of them is cooperation and sharing, not fear and closing down. Open source is not proprietary

The following questions come from an email conversation Shawn Miller and I had about the genesis and guiding logic of UMW Blogs. Shawn is a member of Duke University’s Center for Instructional Technology, and the group is interested in hearing more about the ways we are using blogs here at Mary Washington. If all goes well an edited version this post will also be published on the CIT blog as a way of introducing the means and methods behind UMW Blogs to the Duke campus. Pretty groovy!

Tell us about UMW blogs (brief overview) - when? what was the decision process?

First and foremost, I don’t do brief very well

UMW Blogs is quite simply a web-based publishing platform for the Mary Washington academic community. The distinction between a blog and a more loosely defined publishing platform is actually important because while some people on UMW Blogs use it for what is commonly thought of as blogging, many more use it for a wide range of purposes that often don’t quite match the underlining logic of a blog (see here for a number of examples). So to call it a series of blogs in many ways doesn’t capture the more complex reality, it’s more akin to a dynamic online publishing space for students, staff, and faculty alike.

The official birth date of UMW Blogs is August 27th, 2007, but unlike Athena it didn’t just jump from the head of Zeus one day. It came out of numerous iteration cycles with a variety of free and open source applications. It was born out of a culture of experimentation at UMW more generally, and the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies (DTLT) specifically. The defining experiment was Gardner Campbell’s choice to get all the instructional technologists external web hosting accounts so they could rapidly test and develop several different emerging open source applications such as MediaWiki, WordPress, Drupal, etc. In short, a sandbox approach to exploring educational technologies (you can hear Gardner explain this in three minutes here or a more lengthy presentation by the DTLT group here). Moreover, this approach embraced the best tools already freely available on the web (which were not necessarily limited to open source solutions) for sharing videos, images, bookmarks, and documents such as YouTube, Flickr, and delicious, and Writely (which is now Google Docs).

I think the driving logic behind the experiment—and Gardner, Martha Burtis, Jerry Slezak, Andy Rush, and Patrick Murray-John can all correct me if I am wrong—was to imagine what takes place in the classroom at a university as not external to what was happening already on the wide open web more generally, but rather in constant dialogue with the conversations and resources that already exist out on the web. Moreover, by exploring this avenue more fully the experience in the classroom could only be augmented by the networked approach of thinking and sharing openly on the web. The move towards openness with these Web 2.0 tools at UMW was not so much premised on a pre-determined ideological impetus, but a push for developing the best framework for sharing resources and publishing easily on the web for an entire intellectual community. In many ways openness comes as a serendipitous extension of such a framework, illustrating the point that the architecture of most Course Management Systems (and university websites more generally) are built upon a vision of controlling an image and locking down ideas rather than sharing and opening them up to the world at large. Openness is as much a function of design as it is of any set of beliefs. One might truly desire to be open, but have no means through the web-based publishing tools provided by their campus’s IT department to truly enable the kind of access requisite for allowing others to both find and re-purpose their work and ideas easily–kind of like what Emmanuel Wallerstein says about the impossibility of being a communist in world system controlled and dominated by capitalism.

UMW Blogs is one of many project to come out of the process outlined above, and it certainly is not the end of the road. The group vision was, and still is, to enable the UMW community to take control of and manage their own work, identities and spaces online. One of the things we really like about UMW Blogs os it allows people throughout the community to take ownership of their own work, they control their space to some great extent. For example, they can use their blogs for personal reflection, to frame an eportfolio (here’s a nice student example), they can delete their own work at will, and export their data on the fly and re-import to their own space or a commercial blogging system like Blogger or WordPress.com. Moroever, the syndicated framwork we are using allows instructors and students who are using external applications to easily add their RSS feeds to UMW Blogs so that their work can become part of the searchable and discoverable flow of data. That is the key, don’t try and create a space that locks anyone in to one university tool, rather build a system that can, to quote Whitman, “contain multitudes.” This idea of empowering the community with their own tools for framing the work they do during their time at UMW epitomizes DTLT’s appraoch to instructional technologies (and approach not unique to us in fact, but that was heavily influenced early on by many, many others around the internet such as Alan Levine, Bryan Alexander, Barbara Ganley, Stephen Downes, Brian Lamb, Laura Blankenship, D’Arcy Norman, to name just a few). One practice that has highlighted the importance of managing and developing your voice online has been Ume Blogs’s ability to integrate all the individual threads into a larger, syndicated (or is it syncopated?) chorus of learning on campus. UMW Blogs has brought us closer to that vision than we have been heretofore, but there is still a way to go. Nonetheless, after three years of one-off WordPress blogs and MediaWiki installations, the move towards a larger, integrated campus-wide publishing platform was as much a necessity as it was an experiment.

-Does UMW blogs take the place of a standard LMS for UMW?

No, it doesn’t replace our standard Learning Management System (LMS) which is BlackBoard Basic. UMW Blogs is not a mandate from the administration. In fact, we’re still trying to make sure everyone knows it’s very much an experimental space. Despite this fact, the interest has been so great that it has become a de facto enterprise system simply based on numbers: we currently have 1954 users on campus (out of a population of roughly 4,000), and more than 1800 blogs. Those numbers are far more than the 100 or 200 blogs we were hoping for last fall.

The growth has been phenomenal and much of that might be because the system is not mandated, nor is it cordoned off for a special few. Such facts have no small impact on the community that uses UMW Blogs. It’s active, variegated, experimental, and highly entertaining. Over the last 12 months over 75 UMW faculty have signed up for UMW Blogs, and almost 100 courses have used (or are currently using) this publishing platform in some fashion. And I stress some fashion for often no two courses use it the same exact way, much like the fact that no two professors teach in the same exact way.

For example, Dr. Gardner Campbell’s Milton Seminar this Summer has pushed the limits for his class by pushing them to use their own blogs, and pulling (or feeding) their work into a central aggregated course blog. Professor Steve Greenlaw’s freshman seminar on Globalization is an excellent example of a distributed course sites using all kinds of tools like WordPress.com, Flickr, delicious, and YouTube. Professor Mara Scanlon Asian American Literature course blog used the space as a space where students could choose where they did the work, and built the course resources (such as a syllabus, assignments, etc.) around the active blog space. Professor Sue Fernsebner’s Cultural History of Late 20th Century China provides a centralized course space for the professor to publish announcements and reading questions while at the same time providing pages for tracking all the students’ research blogs. Professor John Morello has used the space for his speech course to allow his class to share and comment on each others video-taped speeches. Our provost, Nina Mikhalevsky, has been using UMW Blogs for two of her course sites for both sharing course materials and creating a dynamic forums via the blog posts. Additionally, Professor Steven Gallik is using UMW Blogs as digital laboratory notebooks for his Cell Biology course, harnessing the power of syndication for his Online Laboratory suite (find out more about this project here).

Yet, all that said it does not replace our LMS because there are several things it cannot do (all of which might be more of a blessing than a curse):

• It cannot integrate into Banner and other institutional data systems.
• It cannot provide pre-populated lists of students and courses for professors.
• You cannot have a testing/quizzing module, nor do you have a grade book.

The logic behind UMW Blogs is a loosely coupled system that gives the community the ability to publish and share online, it is not (nor do we necessarily believe it should be) contorted to meet the the administrative concerns that are often better dealt with by course management systems. Let’s face it, learning management systems are seldom about learning, and primarily deal with administrative overhead.  And that’s fine, but for really powerful and compelling examples of learning, LMSs are probably the last place one would look online if, indeed, one could look at all.

Finally, in terms of the hosting and administration of UMW Blogs, it is hosted off campus and for the first year it was on a shared server and cost us $30 a month. This year we hae it on a dedicated server with nightly backups to an alternate site and it currently costs us about $400 a month. And if a campus wanted to offload the hosting and maintenence entirely, James Farmer’s EduBlogs Campus might be an excellent, cost-effective alternative. The cost of any campus publishing endavor like this should be far more in terms of people working with the faculty and students for imagining ways of using these tools rather than infrastructure and administrative overhead. Howabout that for a cost effective and sustainable model in these troubled economic times!

-What sort of faculty have been interested in participating? Feel free to hit us with some stats.

In many ways the range of faculty has been interesting. It isn’t simply the ase that the most tech savvy folks are using UMW Blogs, as is often the case with new media. Rather, it has attracted those faculty who want to do something online, and want it to be both simple and aesthetically pleasing. This is where such a system has become a tremendous asset for the professors. It is often no harder than writing an email, and the ability for them to maintain full control over their space and make it look the way they want has made it very appealing to a wide range of people. This includes working committees, staff organizations, student organizations, and faculty who want to create online resources for their professional presentations and research. It has offered a low-threshold entry point for many who have been previously uncomfortable with the web, while providing the room for experimentation and customization that keeps those who understand the web intimately continually intrigued and engaged.

Want some stats? Check out a previous post of mine that offers some insight from the beginning of September about overall site usage, posts, comments, etc.

-What have the general faculty and student reactions been?

So far, the reviews have been rather favorable, and the number of people using it might be one indication of this. The dialogue around the tool is wide open, and we are constantly getting feedback about tweaking things and ironing out some interface issues. But most of the conversations center around how to further push the limits of using this space for teaching and learning, which might suggest we have gotten beyond the question of whether or not it’s functional and onto the issues of how we can make it even better as a space for syndicating the amazing stuff happening around campus.

-Since many (all?) the blogs are public, how do you deal with privacy concerns? Along that same thread - have any of the blogs received ‘outside’ attention/feedback/collaboration?

Making blogs public or not is determined on a case-by-case basis by the user. Not everything published on UMW Blogs is open, and every person controls the extent to which others sees what they create. This is essential to the logic of such a system. We wanted to put as much responsibility and control in the hands of those managing their own space as possible. The logic behind the model is that someone who wants to share their work freely can do so as easily as someone who wants to control who sees their work. What is radical about this is the idea of choice built into the system, the ability of controlling permissions and access in LMSs and CMSs is often far more difficult than it should be, and emphasizes just how they were designed around the logic of control and administrative management rather than openness and sharing.

That said, I would imagine most of the sites are open to the public, but that has less to do with the system than the culture. It is made easier given our choice of platforms, but the faculty and students often understand this space as a resource made freely available as part of the mission of a public university. Below I’ll point to a few of the class projects that have intentionally created resources for the world at large:

• Jeff McClurken’s Digital History course sites researched created by students have become heavily trafficked resources by the local community (check out the Historical Markers student site);

• Marie McCallister’s Eighteenth-Century Audio have become a resource that has collected and contributed hundreds of audio files to the internet more generally;

• Claudia Emerson’s Literary Journals projects that provides students the ability to envision, solicit entries and create a web-based literary journal over the course of a semester.

If you followed any of the links above, you may have noticed that many of these sites are not blogs at all, but dynamic websites for publishing research, media, and creative works for the world at large.

-In terms of using blogs (and in this case Wordpress) is the main thing the platform (ie: Wordpress makes so many things possible) or the concept (ie: blogs have a flexible nature to them)?

The application we are using, WordPress Multi-User, is indeed a blogging engine, but we have found its open-ended possibilities and simplicity make it far more. It’s a highly flexible and accessible platform that the UMW community can use for anything from publishing dynamic personal web pages to managing courses, or sharing audio and video on the fly to framing eportfolios. So, its ease-of-use and built-in syndication works well for what we are trying to accomplish, and hence was the tools of choice.

All that said, the concept of an open and flexible syndicated publishing platform is far more important than any one application. Moreover, the willingness of faculty and students to experiment has been the key element for something like UMW Blogs to garner the impressive response and buy-in we have had over the past year.

-What sort of plugins/extras/widgets (RSS feeds, Flickr widgets, special help with themes) does your department and/or others at UMW provide?

This is a tough one to answer because we have so many plugins, widgets and themes (I can give you an idea, but an exhaustive list might well be impossible). Our method for themes and plugins is that we basically test themes and plugins before we add them to the system to make sure they don’t crash our installation. We are open to people in the community requesting both themes and plugins if they need more functionality or a different layout. Our group either helps them find it (often when we are working with a specific professor who expresses a particular need), or we take the larger communities requests and  recommendations and test them out to make sure there are no issues.

Part of the genius of this system is that additional functionality comes at no extra cost. More importantly, such a system encourages faculty and students to explore the framework and think about what they would like to see and go out and find it. In that very act there is a different relationship to how you frame the educational experience online.

For a list of regular plugins we offer on UWM Blogs see this post, for WordPress Multi-User specific plugins see this post (which is generally accurate, but a but outdated now), and for a list the the themes (although not an exhaustive list) see James Farmer’s Farms 100 Big Ones Theme Pack for WPMu.

Ok, that’s it! If I missed anything or was less than clear (which is often the case), just let me know and I will clarify and expound where appropriate. Thanks for providing the opportunity to think closely about what exactly UMW Bogs is all about, I always relish the opportunity

I have to give some love to the work Esther White is doing with WPMu at Smith College Blogs, it is well worth a look. She has shared her process for customizing the front page, which details some very cool hacks. Moreover, today she posted about using WPMu as a space for faculty bio pages and personal blogs/sites.

I just met with some folks from College Relations to talk about how they could use WordPress for faculty bios, which got me totally amped! They want to make faculty responsible for updating their own bios, which was being done with Adobe Contribute, with much resistance from the faculty….We settled on this for a plan: College Relations folks will administer a Faculty blog with one page for each faculty member with a bio….Faculty members can also update their personal pages/blogs and link back to them from their bio’s on the Faculty blog if they’re into that sort of thing. We also discussed ways to get the RSS feed from their personal blog to show up on the bio page….

Very cool stuff, and the plugin for bringing in faculty RSS feeds may very will be aggr. It’s this kind of thing that just further reinforces how useful it is to share what happens in our work regularly. Moreover, it illustrates how key it is for colleges to have a simple, powerful publishing application that will allow this to happen more readily. Looks like Esther is taking care of this for Smith College, so bully for her.

I stumbled upon a bizarre WPMu comments bug today (it may also effect single WP installs, but I’m not sure). Here’s the skinny, if you include to: with two trailing spaces, you will not be able to post a comment on UMW Blogs or bavatuesdays. I’m not sure this is true for all WPMu sites, and I guess others would have to test it for certainty, but it is definitely the case on the two WPMu installs I have tested it on. As soon as you try and post the comment containing the to: with two trailing spaces it will throw a 404 error. Think I’m kidding? Try and comment here with a to: and two spaces, I dare you, hippie. Heck, I’ll even give you 100 bucks if it gets through.

Thanks go to Patrick for knowing about this bug and helping me trouble shoot it, I would have been flummoxed without him.

Update: Even more bizarre is that I tried posting this post with the to: and two trailing spaces and it wouldn’t let me publish the post either, it just threw a 404 error. Wow, what a strange, strange bug.

When putting a series of videos in a post or page with Anarchy Media Player, I get the following bug when viewed in Firefox 3:

Anarchy Media Player, Firefox 3 bug

Seems like one or two videos will show up, then the subsequent videos show just a part of the play button, and no sign of the video anywhere. Are others having a similar issue? I tested it on more than one WPMu install, and the same issue occurs in both. Seems like it is triggered when there are several videos in one post.

I also tested it on Safari, where the videos show up fine. Any ideas?

Image courtesy of Looking for Fish tacos at ELI 2006, aka CogDog.

Well, I have finally gotten a free minute to get this all down, and get it down I will in hopes that I can drum up some help and support in working through a couple of the issues we’re having with FeedWordPress. So, here goes my state of the union address for FeedWordPress syndicating student work to class blogs on UMW Blogs….

First, FeedWordPress is the real deal, it is a solid interface, not too complicated, works out-of-the-box without cron plugins, and makes syndication a breeze. (D’Arcy overviews it beautifully here). Combine this simple syndication with all the tag and category feeds made available by Donncha’s Sitewide Tags plugin and you got the goods, EDUGLU-o-rama! As the great Mara Scanlon said after we demonstrated the power of FeedWordPress for her Ethics and Literature course today, “This is getting so much easier!” And that it is, she suffered through the days of BDP RSS and the untold issues with WP-Autoblog last year with character and fortitude, and her recognizing this afternoon that the syndication angle is coming together was a morale boost, for she doesn’t compliment ed tech stuff often or lightly.

So, I’m really excited. I can see some real potential and power here, we have over 15 classes using some version of FeedWordPress syndication, and for the most part it works seamlessly, enter one feed for a class tag, and the course blog populates itself, aggregating the student blog posts tagged accordingly. All is good….well, almost good.

Here are some of the issues we have run up against in the last week, in order of gravity:

1) For a few classes we are actually feeding the posts in with comments turned off and the permalink sending the reader back to the original blog. This works well when the feed is first syndicated in FeedWordPress. However, after that the subsequent posts that are pulled in link within the course blog, the permalink no longer send the reader back to the original post on the student’s blog. This sucks! This was a way to allow posts to aggregate in one place, but lead the rest of the class back to the student’s space, particularly useful if the class is subscribing to the course blog feed, for all the feeds will immediately take the reader to the student’s blog, a way to aggregate feeds from a variety of sites off one feed (a kind of tag specific OPML feed for class sites). So, this one is major, and it ain’t working as of now

2) This may be related to number one, but for several feeds that I click on that have been aggregated via FeedWordPress I get the following error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function wp_insert_category() in /home/umwblogs/public_html/wp-content/mu-plugins/sitewide-tags.php on line 120

Making me think there may be a correlation between the FeedWordpress issues and the Sitewide Tags plugin. Anyone experience anything similar to this?

3) After FeedWordPress is activated and up and running, if you try and create a Link (just a plain old link in the Write–>Link tab) it actually creates a new, malformed feed in FeedWordPress. Bizarre. This doesn’t necessarily hurt anything that I know of, and I stress that I know of.

4) FeedWordPress doesn’t pull in tags from syndicated posts. Not a huge deal for us right now, but it would be useful.

5) The creation of categories from syndicated posts doesn’t work out-of-the-box. You have to actually update the rss-functions.php and rss.php files using the two they provide in the MagpieRSS Upgrade folder that comes with the FeedWordPres plugin (thanks for pointing this out, D’Arcy).

Ok, that’s it. I’m gonna post a modified version of this on the WPMu forums as well to see if anyone knows anything. The plugin author, Charles Johnson, seems to have been busy with other things and hasn’t upgraded his plugin for WP/Mu 2.6+, and frankly the guys built it out and supported it brilliantly. And once your plugin becomes popular, it must seem like as much as a burden as a service to constantly update and maintain it, I’ve seen it happen with a number of good syndication plugins which makes me nervous. We need to support these folks, and help them develop it out, or contribute accordingly.

So, there it is. FeedWordPress is about as close as we’ve come to realizing the syndication bus in major way, mad props to Andre Malan for turning me onto it again at Norther Voice this past February, and if anyone has any ideas for making it work a bit more consistently don’t be shy.

Oh yeah, one more thing.

The BDP RSS widget Andre Malan created for allowing people to add their feeds to a site via BDP RSS would make even more sense these days for FeedWordPress.

OK, I’m officially in full blown UMW Blogs blogging mode, I will most likely prove insufferable for the next month or so, and that’s just the way it is, suckas!

Steve Harris Stalinism Blog (Oh what a header)

Today I actually gave my first advanced training session on WordPress to a group of five faculty. And I have to say it was a ball. Professors Steve Harris (History), Michael Killian (Biology), Betsy Lewis (Spanish), Andrew Dolby (Biology), and Zach Whalen (English/New Media Studies) were nice enough to remain polite through a kind of abstract session on UMW Blogs as syndicated publishing platform. Because all of these faculty were to some degree familiar with UMW Blogs, and could navigate the application rather well, we went through a few quick questions about uploading and the new interface and then proceeded to focus on how the syndicated logic of a course blog works. Exactly how does WPMu re-publish students work form their own space into a course blog? What kind of setup allows the student to compose and publish their work on their own blog/academic portfolio space yet feed it out easily?.

These are the questions we wrestled with, and I figured I’d blog the details of this setup for other mavericks WordPress users like Professors Sue Fernsebner and Jeff McClurken who will likely be adopting a similar method. So what follows is a tutorial for creating a syndication rich course blog using sitewide tags and FeedWordPress.

Here it is (is that The Roots I hear on the headphones or is it Yo La Tengo?):

For a while now we have been using BDP RSS at UMW Blogs for aggregated course blogs, but with that plugin out of development for a while now, it is time to explore some other aggregating options. The heirs to the spam aggregating plugin WP-Autoblog (long defunct) are WP-O-Matic and FeedWordPress. Given the elegance and simplicity of FeedWordPress it is the republishing aggregator of choice at UMW Blogs these days. What does it do?  Well, quite simply it republishes a post (or several posts) from one blog into another, and provides a series of option to customize the republishing of a feed.

So, take this plugin (which I will go into more detail on below) and marry it with Donncha’s new Sitewide Tags Page plugin, which generates feeds for sitweide tags from a WPMu install. In other words, every time a person uses a shared tag on a post in their own blog, it automatically becomes part of a larger feed for that tag. So, if students for History 101 tag all their posts for this class hist101 in their own blogs, a sitewide feed on that tag will be generated, and it will look like this:

 http://tags.umwblogs.org/tag/hist101/fee…

So, that url above contain the posts from every student blog tagged with hist101, groovy, right?

OK, so the tag needs to be unique and students need to remember to use, but if those things happen, then this is one single feed for an entire distributed class that could consist of as many as 30 blogs. And this is where the details of FeedWordPress come in handy.  So, we have the feed for all the student blog posts relevant to History 101, all we need to do now is activate the plugin FeedWordPress and do the following:

1. Go to the Syndication tab in your WordPress stall that is created once you activate the plugin and add your sitewide tag feed, and click syndicate.



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2. If the feeds work swell, no errors, then click the syndication button.



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3. After that, go to the Syndication–>Options Subtab and customize the options for your feed (make sure it updates automatically and you consider if you want the permalink to take people back to the student blog, etc.



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4. Categories for syndicated posts do work (attention WPMu über admins: I learned this thanks to the ever wise D’Arcy Norman, you just have to do the Magpie RSS Upgrade included with the plugin). You can have the feed you are syndicated come into its own category or even include the categories the students use in their posts. I still can’t get this plugin to include tags fro the original post, however.


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5. Comments and ping can be enabled or disabled (you may want to disable them if you want people to comment on the student’s own blog (this is where changing the permalink option to original post might be useful). You all can choose the author settings here.

6. After it is customized to your liking, you can then return to the main syndication tab, and check the radio box aligned with this link and click the “Upgrade checked links”  button. And the posts will start a feeding




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If you would like to get a sense of what a course blog like this might look like, take a look at the master course blog wrangler Gardner Campbell’s phenomenal Milton Seminar course taught this summer. I love his design, and he has the permalink going back to the student’s blog, while aggregating all the distibuted comments for all the students blogs in the sidebar. Gardner used FeedWordPress to great effect, and while this blog isn’t feeding off of one sitewide tag feed, there were few enough students so that Gardner could add the students’ feeds manually to the FeedWordPress plugin.

Gardner Campbell's Attack of the Summer Miltonauts course blog

Now, imagine the sitewide tag feed for Gardner’s blog as just one less step to do, and one giant step towards complete automation. We are getting there people!!! Die BlackBoard die

I have been mentioning DSader a lot lately on this blog, and that’s mainly because I have been deep into WordPress Multi-User mode for a couple of weeks now. And between the upgrade to 2.6 and the general overhaul of plugins, themes, etc., I find I’ve devoted no insignificant amount of time to plugin hunting –a truly enjoyable activity. For many of my most valuable WPMu plugins, I continually find I am utilizing DSader’s work. He wrote the following plugins that I can name off the top of my head: Userthemes (a must), Sitewide “Three-in-One” Multi Widget panel, Toggle Admin Menus Sitewide, and the indispensable More Privacy Options, to name a few.

So, there is no question DSader has been a veritable mensch when it comes to sharing with the WPMu community, and I’d like to say thanks. But before I even can he comes out with an updated version of his Sitewide Comment Tracking plugin for WPMu that reminds me just how deeply indebted I am to his work. If you haven’t tested it, I highly recommend it. It tracks the comments you have left on numerous blogs within the WPMu community. So, for example, If I leave comments on various blogs, I can track them from the Comments–>My Comments tab. It provides an awesome interface to quickly scan where you’ve commented and who has responded, an amazingly powerful feature for a controlled, yet deeply distributed architecture like WPMu.

Here’s what it looks like:

DSader's My Recent Comments plugin for WPMu

Think about it, this is an amazing way to let faculty and students know how they can track response to their comments easily, something which isn’t all that easy in the regular blogosphere. So an engineered improvement to make the community potentially more manageable.  And so many of DSader’s plugins are just like that, it’s as if he were programming for UMW, he comes from an educational setting and it’s amazing how many of our needs and desires are met and satisfied by his work

Update: While writing this I received an email from him telling me the Sitewide 3-in-1 Widget panel has been updated, with a bug or two fixed, Is DSader sick or what? What can I say, it’s people like him that make this whole thing so much funner and cooler. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

UMW Blogs has got a brand new bag, with no small assistance from Andy “EDU” Rush nation who turned me on to the beautiful theme PrimePress (Andy’s the go to theme guy without a question), along with Serena Epstein an Jerry Slezak who provided the gorgeous header images of the UMW campus. The redesign took a couple of days with some on and off work, and before I get into the details of that, I wanted to take a quick poll. PrimePress offers you two different looks, and I wanted to know which one people preferred.

Here is UMW Blogs with the gray background:

And here it is with the white background:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Now for the anatomy of the redesign of UMW Blogs. I have to say that a year ago this time I had spent many a long hour trying to get everything working on the front page of UMW Blogs. I blogged the process for creating the front page here, and talked extensively about the elaborate hack to get sitewide tags and a sitwewide archive here.

This time around, my life was significantly easier, and I think that’s a testament to how far the WPMu community has come over the last year. It never ceases to amaze me how folks like Donncha, D Sader, andrea_r, Andre Malan, and Enej Bajgoric, amongst many, many others, have made the creation of a state of the art publishing platform for Mary Washington elegant, simple, and powerful as hell. So, it’s people that have little or nothing to do with UMW that have enabled truly cutting edge publishing possibilities for little money and even less programming know how.

The Home Page

The homepage for the redesign really captures just how much easier things have become, and also point to some necessary re-aligning of plugins, resources, and syndication. For example, the previous version of UMW Blogs front page was almost entirely driven by the BDP RSS plugin for aggregation, in this iteration it has all but disappeared. I am keenly aware that the developer for this awesome plugin hasn’t updated it in over a year, and while it still works swimmingly in version 2.6 (a testament of the solid coding), I’m not sure how much long it can hold out, and I’m afraid its time to move on. That’s were two plugins I have already blogged about recently have allowed me to move on with little or no separation anxiety: Donncha’s Sitewide Tags plugin and D Sader’s “3-in-1″ widget.

Between these two plugins I can have the 10 most recent posts, a sitewide tag cloud, and an archive in my front page sidebar (these features would have been impossible for me last year, and now it is as two plugins and a customizable widget). Moreover, Donncha’s Sitewide Tag goodness powers, the Recent Posts, Tags, and Archives pages of UMW Blogs that I will get to in more detail below.

As I mentioned already, PrimePress is the theme, and the header images are homegrown.  The login is a little bit of PHP code Patrick Murray-John whipped up, and you can download it here and drop it into your sidebar should you need it.

Finally, the blog for the UMW Blogs homepage blog will be the site we use for the feature articles that chronicle and share the activity, cool blogs, and course projects that are happening throughout the UMW community.

Courses, Support, and Contact Pages

The Courses page is pretty straightforward, and it is going to be a directory of courses being hosted on UMW Blogs, and it will be up nd running by Monday.  I have some idea of how I am going to feed this stuff in, but for the most part it will be relatively traditional directory of courses being taught around campus using this publishing platform, but I have some more thinking to do here–any recommendations?

The Support pages are awesome, and this marks for me one of the most significant leaps forward over the last year. namely, the Bliki has arrived people! And that is thanks to the awesome work of Brian Lamb’s UBC rat pack of developers like Andre Malan and Enej Bajgoric. The are working on integrating MediaWiki and WPMu as a kind of symbiotic distributed publishing framework, which Brian talked about in a screencast here. The fruit of this syndication rich framework has made my life a million times easier thank to Enej’s plugin Wiki Inc, which basically take an article from a MediaWIki installation and republishes it seanlessly on a WordPress page.  So all the documentation for UMW Blogs done in MediaWiki can now effortlessly be pulled into a page on the home blog for UMW Blogs. So the pages for support like the FAQ, WordPress Guide, and “10 Ideas for Using UMW Blogs” are all MediaWiki articles posing as blog pages—bliki bling bling!

Wiki Inc Plugin for WordPress

And then there is the Embed MediaWiki Sections plugin that allows you to copy and paste a section of a wiki article into a blog post or page, kinda like YouTube embedding for MediaWiki content. I played with this one a bit earlier this Summer, but haven’t got back to it yet.  Not sure if all the bugs are out, but I’m convinced this  will make things insanely interesting for the holy grail of the Bliki, which is just another name for a distributed publishing framework that can be collaborative, simple, and polished all at the same time.

The Contact page is the Dagon Design Secure Form Mailer plugin inserted in a page, simple, secure, and customizable.

News, Sitewide Tags, and Archives

The the News tab on the Front page links to the UMW News Blog, which is actually a separate blog from the home blog  http://news.umwblogs.org) which gives it its own feed, and a separate way to pull in the RSS feed in the home page sidebar. The trick to making it integrate seamlessly is just dressing it up in the same theme with the same widgets and hacked the navigation menu to match that on the homepage of UMW Blogs. Simple.

The Sitewide Tags tab also links out to another blog, which is actual the blog which is automatically created through Donncha’s Sitewide Feeds plugin I mentioned earlier. This site changes the game in my mind, and it provides everything from sitewide posts, tags, categories, and archives in one fell swoop. It rules, and I simply dressed this site up in the same theme as the home page, and hacked the navigation menu accordingly.  Moreover, if you go to the front page of the tags.umwblogs.org blog you’ll see th most recent post, which on the front page has been substituted with featured blogs. The Tags tab is just a page on the tags.umwblogs.org blog that has a Simple Tags tag cloud running, which will by default collect all the tags from around UMW Blogs, as well as provide a working feed for each tag (major possibilities here!).

The Sitewide Archives tab does much of the same thing, but this is just using a hacked version of the archive template for PrimePress that will allow people to search all of UWM Blogs, see posts archived by month (or day or year), as well as the last 100 posts that have come through the system.

And voila! That’s it! All the hacking and kludging I had to do last year has been replaced by clean and elegant solutions that make this years model a step up indeed.  We couldn;t have done it without the community, so a big thanks to all of you making WPMu about as bitchin a publishing engine as I’ve seen.

Now, the semester is poised to start, and it’s time to make this baby sing with 1500 new blogs.  Let’s get ‘em!