How Do You MU?

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!

Over the weekend just past, edublogs.org was upgraded, which involved some downtime. The upgrade seems to have had some unexpected and unwelcome effects on this blog.

In particular, the list of WPMU Hosts was emptied. It looks as though this is caused by a change in the way link categories work (and WPMU Hosts is a link category). Less urgent, and more easily fixed, was the change in template to the default. I’ve restored White as Milk as the template.

James recently posted a couple of bits of theme-related news. One is that he has removed the grey bar from the top of this and each of the other 3000+ edublogs. Thanks for that!

The other is that he’s made the Fauna theme available. In fact, I’m currently using it on my Management Prof blog. It’s good for WordPress, and even better for WPMU, that the theme can be modified without direct access to its source code. Fauna is one of two themes I know about that allows this, Regulus being the other.

These two things are related, not just because they help us have better-looking blogs, but also because they suggest ways in which WPMU blogs can credit their host (edublogs in this case) in a variety of ways, depending on what each blogger finds appealing and attractive.

For example, I think it would be possible to make available a Fauna header graphic that included an edublogs logo.

It is certainly possible, in some themes other than Fauna and Regulus, to display images as part of links. There is currently a very clumsy example in the sidebar of this blog. A link to edublogs, including a logo, would be an appropriate part of the sidebar of this blog. I’m sure that other edubloggers would feel similar.

I hereby re-suggest an EduBlogs logo design contest…

Themetastic! I have to agree with James about the wider selection of themes now available here at Edublogs. I have switched to “White as Milk,” which meets my current criteria for this blog’s theme. I like the way it looks. It has the sidebar on the left; I believe that this makes the sidebar, and hence the list of WPMU hosts, more prominent than when they were on the right.

I just saw in the WordPress.com faq blog a question about putting associating buttons and other images with links. The answer is that you can do this when you “Add Link.” There is a box for you to enter an image URL.

I just checked to see if EduBlogs.org is running a recent enough build to have this same box. It is, and it does. So, James, if you provide a sidebar-sized EduBlogs logo, I will gladly link to it from this blog. And I’m sure that many other grateful EduBloggers will do likewise.

I expect that many of the other WPMU hosts are running a recent enough build to have the same feature. So they, similarly, could offer their bloggers a button to wear proudly in the sidebar.

James, who runs edublogs.org, and hence hosts this and well over a thousand other blogs, recently posted thoughts on running edublogs. I was very pleased to see this. I’d be very interested to see similar posts from the folks running other WPMU hosts.

James’ post covers three aspects of hosting edublogs. 

• Purpose. “I want edublogs.org to provide free, high quality blogs for educational professionals.” Now that’s what I call a clear mission statement.
• Technical. James would like to do more in terms of community-building, but there are limits, some time-related, some technical, to what he can currently do. I get the impression that WPMU is handling the large number of blogs pretty well.
• Sustainability. The large number of blogs impacts bandwidth, which in turn impacts bank balance. Starting to charge for edublogs would go against the very purpose of edublogs (see above quote).

Matt commented that he’s interested in putting edublogs on the WordPress.com architecture, and that this would help with some of the technical issues. I’m not sure whether this is an offer to fund the bandwidth, and thus help with the sustainability of edublogs.

Again, many thanks to James, not just for the hosting, but also for this very interesting recent posting. 

I haven’t posted much to this blog in the last few weeks. That’s in part because I’ve been posting to other blogs. It’s in part been because there are no icons above the post when I edit, so I have to hand-code (or import from elsewhere) any links, formatting, or other html I need. That’s been the case for a few weeks now.

Another reason is because the main thing I’ve been doing with this blog is maintaining a list of WPMU hosts. I do that in the sidebar (and, as I posted recently, with an RSS feed from del.icio.us).

I wanted to reflect that by using a theme that had two columns, with the sidebar on the left (i.e. a theme that makes the sidebar more prominent than do most themes, which put the sidebar on the right). So I looked for one under Presentation in the Site Admin for this blog.

I find that Presentation shows me an image for only a few of the themes available at EduBlogs. So, in order to see if a theme meets my current criterion (i.e. sidebar on the left) I select it and then view the site. I find that many of the themes put all the links together. In the case of this blog, it means that the regular Blogroll and the list of WPMU themes get mixed up together.

James, I know that you are very busy, but when you see this, perhaps you could comment or email to let me know, and we can talk about these things?

One of the reasons I regret not being at the Business Blog Summit this past weekend is that it meant I wasn’t at Matt’s demo of WordPress 1.6 and WordPress.com. But I am covering the blog coverage, and reporting on the reporting, at my main blog.

In some ways, WordPress.com will be rather simular to EduBlogs. It’ll be free (although it is currently invite-only), hosted, WPMU. Typing of EduBlogs, I note that there are now over 600 of them!

After following the instructions in this post, the “broken posting buttons” problem seems to be fixed. There are icons rather than words in the buttons. In other words, posting in WP looks more like posting in most other blogging tools I’ve used. But what’s happened to my beloved blockquote button?

I should note that the above happened before I went to Options and indicated that I wanted the “visual rich editor.” Let me post this, then give that a try…

Update: things don’t seem to have got visually richer after I checked the box… 

Actually, it’s “1.6-ALPHA-2-still-dont-use” to which James has upgraded edublogs.org. At first glance, there aren’t many changes. There’s an option to use “the visual rich editor,” but I don’t see the ensuing richness.

“Presentation” shows a 250×187 image of some of the available themes. I’m not sure I like the way it works. First of all, if there are lots of images to show, it could be very slow to load. Second, clicking on an image selects that theme, where I expected that it would show a larger image.

I’m sure that there are lots of other things that I haven’t found yet…