How Do You MU?

Has it been over a month since I updated this site? Do I know what rhetorical means?

I’ve just updated the lists in the sidebar. A couple of new networks and a few new hosts, several of which are non-English.

The WordPress Multi-User Forums are “are being redone, should be back tomorrow.” They’ve been in this state for a few days now. Any ideas one when tomorrow will arrive?

A recently-started topic at the WPMU forums concerns scalability. The original poster asked about scaling WPMU to a million blogs. The first reply was about WordPress.com, and the next was about Lyceum. I’ll be following this topic with interest.

I just saw at Boingboing a link to Lyceum, “a powerful and easy to use multi-blog WordPress that could be used for installations with 2 or 200,000 blogs.” Given that WordPress is free/open source, anyone is free to use and change the code, and that’s what the Lyceum team did.

My immediate question is: how does Lyceum relate to WPMU? In particular, why do Lyceum? Why use it, rather than WPMU? How does the multi-user-ness of Lyceum differ from that of WPMU?

I recently tried BubbleShare, and am impressed by how quick and easy it is to create and share online photo albums. I also recently saw this thread on the WPMU forums. James kicked off the thread with an interesting post on which plugins he currently has running at edublogs (yes, this very host). He concluded the post with a plugin wishlist, which he in turn concluded with: “A flickr plugin that works (believe me I’ve tried but failed).”

These two trains of thought collide head-on at the BubbleShare Add Album to My Blog Junction. I’ll just paste in the BubbleShare-provided code, and…

it still doesn’t work, perhaps for the same reasons Flickr plugins are tough. I write still because I’m retrying this, following the comment from Albert of Bubbleshare. I wondered if switching off the rich text editor would help, but I’ve forgotten where it is I have to go to switch that off.

By the way, this is the album I tried to insert into this post. I was originally going to grab some of the photos tagged WordPress from Flickr. I was surprised to find that most of them are under copyright, rather than under Creative Commons. I don’t regard that as a big deal, but it seems a little strange when photos associated with free/open source software are under copyright.

Matt remarks that WordPress.com is about to hit 100,000 blogs. I suspect that makes it the largest WPMU host. Whether it is or not, the number is impressive, in terms of the number of people who have signed up (demand) and of the scalability of the software (supply). Congrats to Matt, Donncha, et al.

Matt’s remark is an aside (strictly speaking, an aside within an aside), in the context of the new Next Blog feature of WordPress.com. I don’t care for that feature. Although I’m as big a fan of serendipity as the next blogger, it’s highly unlikely to take me to a blog I’m interested in.

It reminds me of the similar “feature” of Blogspot. In fact, the whole bar at the top WordPress.com reminds me to the bar at the top of my old blog. If I wanted Blogger-like things, I’d have stayed with Blogger. Having said that, it’s not as bad as the BloggerBar, since the bar is only visible to those currently signed in to their WP.com account.

I’ve only just noticed that the WordPress Codex now includes a page about WPMU. This is yet another sign of WPMU’s importance to WordPress. Maybe I will edit the page to link to this blog…

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…

I started keeping track of WPMU host sites on Sep 10, 2005. The WPMU Hosts link category started off with 5 such sites. A little later, I started keeping del.icio.us track of WPMU hosts, so that anyone interested could subscribe to the feed.

I’m now adding the 50th host to the list. Welcome, Blogates! Thanks to all the people running WPMU hosts, and to the developers.

I’ve just seem (and replied to) a couple of interesting things over at the MU forums:

• The announcment of Blogg.com, which is I think the 49th WPMU host site.
• A discussion of when it is best to go with WPMU, as opposed to multiple WP installations. This is an important issue for people wanting to offer WP blogs.

If the above link to the forums doesn’t work, try this one.