Painful process of choosing new blogware

As most of you can tell, this site is currently run on MT.

Unless you've been away from the internet for awhile, you know that MT has changed their licensing policy to be FAR more restrictive of its non-commercial uses. It is, of course, their sandbox. I've had a great time with it, and I still think it's among the easiest-to-use of the blogwares I've looked at, but I think it's time that I see other blogware.

Because of these changes, I need to find new blogware on which to run my fall classes.

I'm still looking around.

Being the shameless hussy that I am, I am perfectly willing to consider any candidate that meets my requirements. If Bill Gates made blogware, and he just happened to make the BEST blogware, I'd cozy up to Windows in a heartbeat.

I'm all for the best tool for the job. Other than that, I'm an agnostic.

Drupal looks WAY too hard to install, maintain, and conceptualize. Postnuke looks like it meets my requirements, but I've heard that it's not being as actively-developed as it once was (it looks pretty active to me). I'm not willing to futz with PHPNUke or Pmachine (though I've heard good things).

I'm guessing that Postnuke it is.

"Power Corrupts. Powerpoint corrupts absolutely"

Edward Tufte explains why Powerpoint is Evil.

Didn't you secretly suspect this anyway?

BlogChangeBot

At last, an easy to send notifications without having to add everybody's email address to the 'notifications' page.

With BlogChangeBot, you get IM'd every time your favorite blog is updated.

1. Go to your AIM window (or download AIM)
2. Add Blogchangebot to your buddy list
3. Open a window 'speaking' to blogchangebot and type 'subscribe www.yourblog.com' where 'your blog' is the URL for the blog you want notification on.
4. Hilarity ensures

MT; it does everything but create content

In this article, Matt Haughey talks about using MT to manage an entire site, and how to use SSI's and the template systems to do that.

I do an extremely small, limited version of that here on Weeblog, and I intend to do a bigger version of the website I manage at work. I'm learning a lot about the whole site management process thanks to a co-worker who has a much bigger and more difficult job managing his network of 19k-odd users at the Long-Term Ecological Research center.

A brief history of permalinks

Explaining permalinks is far more difficult then I'd imagined. Hopefully something like this history of permalinks will make it easier for me to conceptualize and therefore explain to others.

Talk about PhP or writing?

Jeff on Babel expressed an interest in talking about the blogging experience in terms of the different types of software; drupal, mt, etc..

That kind of feeds into the argument of blog as technology versus blog as rhetorical space. To some, a blog is the software and the user's experience with the software, and because of that they focus on the technology that makes blogs possible.

To others, blogs are experiential in terms of an individual's relationship to a blog as relationship, whether as an individual or one of a community.

I think I'd like to stay away from the technology experience. I'm as geeky as the next gal (ok, maybe more so), but I would really like to contribute more to the discussion about what people do when they blog. I'm most interested in group blogging and blogging as dialogue, since it relates to a looser definition of "argument."

I think getting bogged down in the technical details sets up for that criticism of "we're talking about technology and not writing."

I'd rather talk about blogging as writing.

MT Posting Instructions

Here's the most detailed instructions I can think of to teach newbies how to post and send their initial notification.

Appendix A: Instructions to the {insert team/group name} blog interaction.

The new blog {insert name of blog} is up at its temporary location at {insert URL}.

My challenge to you:

Log in and post a brief biography about yourself. Who are you, where did you go to school, what do you see as your role in the class?

How to enter the secure URL:

There are two logins, one to let you see the secure site and one for your personal userid (use this only if you are using a password-protected site) Note: If there is not a secure URL, you can just go to the blog's url at {url} and log in using your personal userid and password. To log into the secure website:

1. Go to the secure site at {insert URL}
2. The security login is: {insert userid}
3. The security password is: {insert universal site password}

(you will need to do this whole security login/password step twice) 3 After you put in the login and password, you will see the blank blog with {insert blog name} at the top.

How to log into the blog

1. To activate your userid you will need to click on the "post to {blog name}" link towards the bottom of the page in red. It will prompt you to enter a personal login and a personal password. Below is the preliminary list of personal logins for everyone {include list of names with userids}. The personal password for everyone is initially {insert generic password}, without the paranthesis, all lower-case.
2. Once you've logged in, you should change the password immediately. To do this click on the "Edit your profile" link. The profile area will allow you to change your userid, password, and contact information. It also prompts you to add a clue for password recovery (it asks for birthplace). Click 'save' to save your results, and the next screen will tell you that your changes were saved.

You are now ready to post to the blog.

How to post to the blog

1. At the top of the page, use the drop-down menu to select {our blog name} (it will be selected by default) and hit 'go' (you can also use the 'menu' and 'main menu' links to do this)

2. Select 'new entry' from the menu bar on the left. It will take you to the 'create new entry' screen.

3. At the new screen, type in a title and select an archive category from the drop-down menu. For now, select "biography." {these categories are customized for the blog in use}

4. Next, the "Entry Body" area is where you type your post.

If your post is very long, post the first paragraph in the "Entry Body" and the remainder of your post in "Extended Entry". This will create a link at the bottom of your post where people can view the complete entry. Post your entry by selecting the "save" button at the end ("preview" if you want to view it first). Wait for the site to rebuild (it will say that it is rebuilding). The "edit entry" page will tell you that "Your entry has been saved. You can now make any changes to the entry itself, edit the authored-on date, edit comments, or send a notification."

To send a notification

Notifications let everyone know that something new has been posted to the blog. They are very important, especially for new bloggers, to keep everyone abreast of what is being posted to the blog.

1. To send an email notification to us, scroll down to the end of that "edit entry" page (past the save/delete buttons, all the way to the end) until you see "notifications."
2. Select "include entire body" and the entire post will be emailed to everyone on the notifications list (which is all of us).
3. You may then select "view site" from the panel on the left and the site will open in a new window (if your browser isn't set to refresh every time, you might need to reload the browser a few times for the updated information to appear).
4. The site will open in a new window, but the "edit entry" page will remain open in a different window.

In the future, you can edit any of your entries by selecting the "edit entry" button on the left panel, and then selecting an individual entry to be modified/deleted. You can only modify/delete your own entries.

To comment on an existing post

1. To comment about someone else's post, on the blog's front page, select the "comment" button at the bottom of the post that you'd like to comment on.

2. Fill in your userid and email address and then make your comment. Comments are automatically emailed to everyone on the notification list.

Questions?

You can contact me at {insert email address of webmaster} (IM: {insert IM} or via phone at {insert phone number}. Let's blog!

Megnut illustrates why blogging matters

Megnut's powerpoint presentation defining blogs to the initiated. She also details how they pull writing out of the book metaphor and well on our way towards content creation free of wordcount worries (via Plasticbag.org)

Some of these points are very similar to ones I would make to a classroom full of 102 teachers.

CNN article

The CNN article talks about blogging creating a virtual "Hive brain."

Quote from the article: "The way bloggers link and influence each other's thinking could lead to a collective thought process, "a kind of hive brain," said Chris Cleveland, who runs Dieselpoint, a Chicago maker of search software that recently worked with Blogger.com."

This is the information world that students live in and will be sucked in further as this kind of interaction becomes more mainstream. Check out the ragingcow discussion at the end of the article. Blogging meets advertising, and it is completely seamless unless you know how to look.

PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW WHAT THEY'RE LOOKING AT!