How Do You MU?

It’s been years since I updated this blog. The biggest WPMU news in those years is the effective inclusion of WPMU in core WordPress 3.0 (and hence subsequent releases). I’ll continue to write occasionally about multisite networks (the official term for WPMU as part of core WordPress) at my main blog, Changing Way.

So it’s time for one last post to this blog. To Edublogs, many thanks for the hosting, and congratulations on being a huge and successful WPMU site.

This is the first post since June of last year. I haven’t updated the sidebar list of WPMU sites since then. One reason for that is that I’ve been very busy.

Another reason is my feeling that there is probably a better way to keep track of WPMU sites than this blog or, indeed, any blog. I’m currently trying out BricaBox. To see what BricaBox is all about, check out the video (less than 2 minutes) currently at the site’s front page, or the post at my main blog.

Here’s the WPMU Sites BricaBox. After creating it, I entered two WPMU sites: Edublogs, kind host of this very blog, and WordPress.com. I just added all the WPMU sites that are new since I last updated the list in the sidebar of this blog. If BricaBox seems like an appropriate tool, I’ll look in to exporting the list from this blog and bulk loading in to BricaBox.

What do you think? If you’re having trouble using comments on this blog, as I currently am, you can leave a comment @changingway or email me there (andrew@).

Thank you for your patience and attention.

Since the May update post, another half-dozen or so sites have sprung up, several of them particularly interesting. As always, you can see all the most recently-added sites at at the top of my delicious bookmarks tagged WPMU and host. They join the other sites in the sidebar of this blog.

Yes, I am keeping the sidebar list of WPMU sites up to date. The only one to have started in the ~7 weeks since the last update is Go Talk About It. If I’m missing any other new sites, please leave a comment here to let me know.

One of these months, I’ll do a systematic check of which WPMU sites are still going, and take those that aren’t out of the sidebar.

I’ve added a couple of new sites to the sidebar list, and cleaned out some comment spam.

Note, mainly to self. It would make sense to use sidebar widgets for this blog. Since I bookmark WPMU blogs in del.icio.us, I could set up a widget showing the RSS feed for the wpmu tag. I could also get rid of the Archives section of the sidebar, which I don’t think is very useful.

Many users of the web suffer from Multiple Identity Disorder, since they use multiple web services, at each of which they have a username/password and a profile. OpenID is a means of treating MID.

WordPress.com recently became an OpenID producer. Here’s the announcement post. Here’s one of my posts on the news, and here’s another. Here’s the WordPress.com FAQ on OpenID.

And, to finally get to the part that’s relevant to WPMU:we’re going to release the MU plugin, says Matt.

Three new things to report. I’ll selfishly lead with the fact that my main blog, Changing Way, has moved to ChangingWay.org, a domain I’ve owned for a while and which now maps into WordPress.com. So my main blog is now a WPMU blog. The previous blog, ChangingWay.net, still exists at Weblogs.us.

I’ve just added a few new WPMU sites to the sidebar of this blog. This blog is well hosted by edublogs. org, and…

James Farmer has just announced Edublogs premium: “the ability for anyone to set-up, almost instantly, their own fully featured educational blog hosting service.” All the best to James with the premium version of an already excellent service!

I’ve just added a few new WPMU blogs to the sidebar list.

I hope that the 2007 has started well for all out there in WPMU-land.

ASU Blogs is one of the largest and oldest residents of the sidebar list of WPMU sites. A recent Economist article shows that blogging is not the only way in which Arizona State University is embracing Web 2.0.

ASU is using Gmail and other Google web services. There are considerable $ savings, but “a bigger reason than money for switching from traditional software to web-based alternatives has to do with the pace and trajectory of technological change.”

The point of the article is that “consumer technologies are invading corporate computing.” It makes interesting reading, although there are a lot of nits to pick. For example, the article has the misleading title “Work-life balance.” (It’s just as well it has the other quote in this paragraph as its subtitle.)

There is room for doubt about this quote from the CEO of Facetime. “Consumer technologies such as IM usually make employees more productive.” It probably makes them more efficient, in terms of the amount that they can get done in a day. But does it make them more effective, in terms of doing the right things for the organization?

Which raises the question of whether I should be sitting here at work, blogging…

Following the upgrade problem described in the previous post, I’ve just recategorized the sidebar list of WPMU sites. It is now… a sidebar list of WPMU sites.

The sidebar no longer distinguishes between “hosts” and “networks.” The line between hosts and networks was difficult to draw, and sometimes hard to explain.

I haven’t retagged any of the delicious wpmu bookmarks.