I was unhappy with the level of service on our university’s Movable Type weblog server. After the chief architect of this Red Hat Linux-based MT server left our university, the server fell under the purview of a group that had a dismissive attitude about blogging and wanted to “devote as little effort as possible” to the MT server.
A dedicated, managed MT server is necessary at our university because Movable Type’s CGI dependencies will not allow individual installations to run on any of the servers available to faculty, staff, and students. (Boring technical sidenote: I am still trying to get an IIS/Berkeley DB flat file Movable Type installation to work on the Windows web server used for alumni web sites, but a necessary library (DB_File) is still missing. Sigh.)
My first task is the long overdue upgrade to Movable Type 3.2 and installation of the StyleCatcher plug-in! From there, the sky’s the limit.
I really do owe it to my university’s community to make this the best damn blogging server I possibly can. Weblog software as a personal publishing system, as a content management system, and as a social networking tool makes it an invaluable new media technology.
The New Media Consortium recognizes the importance of blogs in their 2005 Horizon Report (PDF), and print and televised media outlets are always running stories about the potentially transformative effects of blogging on journalism, academia, politics, and whatnot.
Of course, the more successful this server is, the more work it means for me. Oof. I suppose it’s a good thing that I already don’t have much of a social life… ;-)
falls over I can’t believe I found your site again. Wow. Hi there.
Welcome back, Lynn. Not too much has changed around here in the past six months or so. Here’s some of the highlights—I went to a conference in beautiful O‘ahu, I was falsely accused of stalking by a paranoid nutjob, I helped organize and attended my 15th high school reunion, I traded in my Bowflex for the latest model, and I temporarily relapsed on the weight thing back over 200 lbs.
Ahhw, I’m sorry. I know you can lose it again though! =D I know very little about Bowflex, honestly, because I rarely work out (I’m one of those people that just can’t seem to gain weight any more - really really not complaining because I used to be closer to 200 than 100…eep) other than bike riding and swimming.
I probably will never attend a high school reunion but I hope it was fun. I’ll have to go back and read entries I missed…so what’s this about a nutjob? And you, a stalker? I scoff!
What was the conference for, specifically? =)
That conference, Lynn, was the annual New Media Consortium conference, where a network of universities and corporations get together and talk about new media technologies.
And, oy vey, that stalker thing. What a nightmare. The first week of the fiscal year I had to clean out the office of a former coworker. Instead of tossing her abandoned personal crap in the dumpster, I threw it all in a box. Then just to show there were no hard feelings (our long friendship had ended abruptly, following one-sided revelations of romantic desire), I stopped by her house on my way home from work and left the box on her doorstep. She called the local cops on me with some twisted tale of romantic obsession. What…ever.