Blogs @ Rice

The blog server has had a rough time for a while now. The number of "spammers" posting content to the blog has made it nearly unusable on our current hardware. Since our main focus is for the Rice community to be able to use this service, we've disabled posting to the blog server from off campus. If you need to post from off campus, you will need to use Rice's VPN service to do so. We are looking into a hardware upgrade of the system and hope to have one available shortly. We will decide after the hardware upgrade whether to turn back on posting from off campus.

The server blogs.rice.edu will be down from 7am to 9am on Friday morning June 3, 2005. We are upgrading the blog software to provide the following features: 1. provide users the ability to manage multiple pages without having to logout 2. allow users to delete comments and trackbacks through gui interface 3. expand the number of templates available for page look and feel 4. provide integrated dashboard for management of the users blogs 5. improve performance and scalability 6. provide a summary.php page so that users can view statistics and recent posts of all blogs 7. enhanced performance charts for pages

With the appearance of an article in the Rice News, blogs.rice.edu has officially launched. Please email blogs@rice.edu if you are at Rice and would like a blog for yourself or your university organization. Yep, we're happy to set up blogs for departments, clubs, teams, etc. Pretty much anything that qualifies for an organizational account on the RUF or for an organization-related mailing list also qualifies for a blog.

Incidentally, the software we're using changed its home on the web. You can now find it at http://www.pLogWorld.net. I believe I've changed the address on all the blog templates.

We hope you enjoy using blogs at Rice!

Dean Lane has back-ups running regularly now, so we're not necessarily a beta service anymore!

Blogs.rice.edu now hosts several IT announcement lists, which we compile into a "metablog" at notify.rice.edu.

Finally, performance tuning and template tweaks continue on an occasional basis. We hope to upgrade to pLog 0.3.2 very soon now.

We think this installation is ready for beta-testers. Here are some things you should know:

• We're running pLog 0.3.1, which uses PHP (including HTMLArea and Smarty templates) and MySQL.
• We chose pLog because it's GPLed and because it provides access control for multiple users and multiple blogs.
• Back-ups and integration with the apply system are next up for development.
• Yes, back-ups are indeed critical for a production service: that's one reason this is still beta.
• We have templates based on the GPLed templates at MovableStyle; please consider this post an essential public acknowledgment.
• Feel free to browse our templates at http://blogs.rice.edu/blog/templates
• You can upload your own templates, but you'll need to change some path info (cf. http://blogs.rice.edu/blog/templates/blog_3/it).

Good luck! Feel free to email us any questions you may have.

Welcome to pLog! If you can read this, it means that your pLog installation is ready and that you can start blogging.