How Do You MU?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is probably one of those blogs in which the sidebar is more interesting than the posts. If you’re in a good mood, you’ll consider that a comment on the sidebar, rather than on the posts.

The main section of the sidebar comprises links to WPMU hosts. I just added eight new links.

So, any rumors of the death of this blog were exaggerated. (By the way, Mark Twain would have been an all-time great blogger.) Rumors of birth, on the other hand, remain delightfully true.

I’ve just tidied up the sidebar to remove the broken-link hosts referred and linked to in the previous post, and to add WPMU hosts that have come to my attention via my post in the forum. I have also delicious-tagged these new hosts as wpmu+host.

A couple of questions, about delicious rather than about WPMU.

• Is there a way of asking delicious for the unbroken sites only? I’d like to ask it for wpmu+host-broken, where “-” is a minus sign. I guess I could tag the unbroken sites with unbroken, but that’s rather clumsy.
• Do any of the many other social bookmarking services allow me to do what I ask for above?

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 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?