Suddenly and without warning, yours truly has become the blog expert at MTSU. It began slowly enough, with doing a workshop on academic uses of blogs and wikis at the MTSU IT Conference. Then we decided that actually having a blog for the conference would be a good thing, so that fell to me as well (never mind the fact that the campus had never even turned on PHP on the webserver). Once over that hurdle, and a few days of struggle to get MySQL happy with talking to PHP, the blog was born. Now I’m in the middle of putting together instruction pages, since this is a very, very new thing for everyone here. In addition, I was just asked to write up an article for the on-campus IT publication about blogs/blogging, so there’s another 300 words or so to pump out on the subject.
EDIT: also, I was just contacted today by the Library here at MTSU…seems they have 3 blogs that they are interested in moving off of blogger and onto our servers. Guess who’s gonna get to help with that?
On top of all that, I’m helping LITA with their blogging efforts, attempting to evaluate different blog software and figure out what they want to settle on as the official LITA blog.
Who knew that this would be a valuable job skill way back when we all started these damn things?
5 replies on “A blogging we will go…”
Um, why did you need PHP turned on for their server? Why not just Blogger it?
Cause blogger sucks?
Actually, because there is a desire to not rely on outside servers, for very good reason. Reliance on external services is a way to end up high and dry later down the road.
There are other reasons as well, of course: more flexibility, higher levels of controls, robust backend management…etc, etc…
your tone suggests you’d rather not still be mussing with blogs?
No, more…surprise that not everyone already knows about them, and is using them effectively. I’m just happy I’ve got a skillset that people find valuable!!
🙂
rocks, doesn’t it? 🙂