As the world of blogging keeps on evolving, we’ve made a lot of changes recently which will make our blogs far more useful to our campus community.

New features include:

  • New themes - We’ve added a ton of new themes, all of which provide support for widgets. What are widgets you ask? Read on!
  • Widgets! - Widgets are a means for you to add new features to your blog such as RSS Feeds, Flickr pics, del.icio.us bookmarks and so much more. Now that our themes support widgets, you have the flexibility to move things around to suit your needs and goals.
  • Content restricted to myPlymouth users - If you have a group or community that could use a blog, but don’t need or wish to share your work with those off-campus, this feature allows you to specify by role (any PSU user, staff, faculty) who will be allowed to view your content.
  • SVN support - This doesn’t mean much to you, but to us in the back room, this will allow us to ensure that all of our themes and widgets get updated automatically thereby ensuring the highest level of security and reliability for you.

If you are interested in blogging but would like more information on how to use WordPress, check out this great tutorial by Kary Boan, a technology specialist for Landrum Middle School in Houston Texas.

If you’ve created a blog, but haven’t seen it in a while, come on back and check it out. If you’ve thought about blogging but haven’t been too sure about what it can do for you, contact John Martin at jemartin AT plymouth DOT edu or at x2926, or better yet start your own blog now!

After a TAG meeting yesterday, it was determined that the blog pilot should be reopened. This is good news for any of you who are interested in trying out blogging at Plymouth State University. Simply click here to create your blog.

At the moment the signup process is not as smooth as we would like it. When you click the link it will ask you to authenticate with myPlymouth. After you do this, your blog will be created and then you will be redirected to the login page for the blog server (sorry no single sign-on yet). Once you’ve logged in here with your regular username and password you are ready to start blogging.

Keep in mind, this is a pilot project so you may experience some bugs or difficulty. Please report any problems you are having to the Help Desk and they should be able to provide limited support. Remember, this is a pilot project, we are all still learning!