Next week, as part of my job, I get to help set up seventy blogs for a university organization that sends interns all over Asia. Actually, I will just set up the template, configuration, and plug-ins for the first one. Then through the magic of scripting, seventy uniquely-named and titled clones will spring forth. One has to love a job where one can “play” with Movable Type during work hours and get paid for it. It is just a shame that it took close to two years to get a production-level weblog server.
It is no secret that the wheels of change in the academic world move slowly, coated with the rust of poor communication, resistance to new pedagogy, siloed departments and sub-departments (groups), and decade-old legacy computing infrastructure. In the media lab where I work, we try to stay as much on the bleeding edge as possible given the bureaucratic, political, budgetary, and personnel constraints that I imagine are far too common in academia. Our media lab’s staff love working with the “latest and the greatest,” as do many of our customers.
One customer request whose frequency has increased over the past couple of years is access to a university-supported weblog host. Most of the time they haven’t used this specific terminology; usually the request is for “a web site where I can post articles, and others can post discussions, but I don’t want to learn Dreamweaver…” Our response, until now, was to admit that we couldn’t help them or to direct them to a third-party hosting company.
In the late spring of 2003, I worked with a colleague in a different group to try to get a copy of Movable Type running on his server (my group, the media lab, was not allowed to run its own servers). Unfortunately, this project was a low priority for him, and it quickly fell apart. We ran into permissions problems, Perl needed to be reinstalled, his server didn’t have enough disk space for the reinstall, yadda, yadda.
This past summer was a different story. Another colleague (from a different group), who is also a fellow blogger, successfully coordinated with a brilliant individual in yet another group (it seems we have more groups and group managers than employees in our organization). This individual was tremendously excited by the idea of blogs, wikis, etc. in an academic context and quickly got a testing server up and running.
We tried a few of the different platforms (WordPress, b2evolution, Movable Type 2.6), but found Movable Type to have the most intuitive admin interface, the most robust feature set, the healthiest developer community, the best plug-in architecture, and the most attractive default templates. Initially balking at the fact that MT 3 was not free or open source, he found their academic prices quite reasonable. I was thrilled by the choice of platforms because I had already learned my way around MT 3 a few months back when my blogging colleague inspired me to join Bloghosts (she also now occasionally gets to play with Movable Type as part of her job).
Within a week of installing Movable Type on his server, this guy had already written his own MT plug-ins in Perl and had written the blog duplication script I mentioned earlier. “Writing plug-ins for MT is so easy!” — “Yes…sure. I believe you.”
The interns will be the second mass blog deployment. The first was a class of twenty-four students last week. This could finally be the “year of the blog” at our university. What excites me about the intern blogs is that these young people really have some interesting stories to contribute, and now because they have the means to reach an audience with those stories, such accounts are less likely to be lost in the fog of fading memory.
The director of the internship program is also enthusiastic about this blogging experiment and hopes to be able to harvest some of the best stories from the interns’ online journals and gather them into a printed volume.
A few colleagues will be promoting our university’s new blog service during a week-long series of blog-related talks and workshops in a couple of weeks. I can’t wait to see how our academic community makes use of this exciting new tool.
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