A few Good Creative Men

A pretty funny satire of “A Few Good Men” that strikes a funny cord, since ads are dying in so many ways.

Migrating to WordPress.com :: Is it feasible?

I’m thinking of migrating a few of my blogs to WordPress.com. Is it doable?

The blogs I’m thinking of moving over here are infOpinions? and Marcomblog.

Now, we’re talking about hundreds, if not thousands, of posts and all the associated images and multimedia files.

I wonder if this is possible and where the instructions might be. Anyone done such a migration?

I’m aware of the Manage -> Import function, but not sure if that can work for all of those posts.  There is, I believe, a 10mb limit to importing xml files.  So, is there a way to transfer a database?

PRblogs.org Now Offers Personalized Widgets

For some time, users of PRblogs.org have desired the ability to personalize their sidebars. Now, that is possible.

…making your blog look the way you want it makes sense and will help us gain users…

Widgets have arrived at PRblogs.org. This will add significant functionality and likely please existing and new users.

Fiddling with plugins, I’ve been able to get Widgets to work on PRblogs.org.

Pretty cool. Visit the example blog at widgets.prblogs.org to see how they look.

In the sidebar, you will see - from the top

• a text widget pointing to an image file,
• a text widget holding Constantin’s code to search for all PR blogs,
• the Google search widget,
• an RSS feed widget, and
• a del.icio.us feed widget.

Pretty nice, huh. Currently widgets only work on two themes - default and classic - but we’ll fix that over the coming week.

I’ll be going through and identifying themes that will work with widgets. All don’t, by the way, and it will likely take awhile for “all” to be made widget friendly. But, I’ll come back and identify the ones I find that work both with widgets and WordPress MU, the versions of WordPress we are running at PRblogs.org.

I’ll consider adding other widgets, if you wish to suggest them. I’m thinking that I’ll not put the PHP execute widget in as that is a security issue. But, there are others out there and I’m open to considering them, if you wish.

Update: Themes that work with widgets on PRblogs.org are now these…

• WordPress Classic
• WordPress Default
• whiteasmilk
• Impact
• Clasikue_v1.1
• Clean Look
• Gespaa_v2
• Letterhead
• Equix
• Hiperminimalist
• Minim8
• Radmod
• ZigZag
• and more to come…

Preparations for HigherEd BlogCon

Check this out: Preparations for HigherEd BlogCon - Overview

HigherEd BlogCon aims to bring together in a single Web space many of the leading players who are transforming academe with their use of the new tools of the Social Web.

Modelled after Global PR Blog Week 2.0, Higher Ed BlogCon will focus on the use of blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasts, vblogs and other digital tools in a range of areas in academe, including (thus far):

* Teaching
* Advancement (Development, Communications & Marketing, Alumni Relations)
* Web sites and Web Development
* Library & Information Resources

Additional sections — depending on interest — could include Research, The Arts, Literature, Sports, and Student Life.

We plan to conduct the event in April. This site will support communications in advance of the event.

Magpie2 - The Semantic Filter

A very interesting site and software: Magpie - a tool for Semantic Web

Magpie uses our ontology infrastructure to semantically markup web documents on-the-fly. The existing technologies in this problem domain tend to be rather heavyweight, and often modify the appearance of the actual webpage. Whilst these modifications may sometimes be acceptable, sometimes they may be a cause of a serious annoyance on user’s behalf. Often, the existing technologies rely on one very specific ontology…

CollegeWebEditor.com :: Great Site/Blog

collegewebeditor.com is a site worth your time. Karine Joly has been “working as a Web Editor for a small US College since 2002. I also have my own Web business.” Her blog is a very neat niche topic area, yet offers her many issues to write about and discuss.

A recent post was of particular interest to me. Public Relations: Make sure you monitor bloggers posting about your university.

In that post, she asks “Does your PR office think blogs are just a fad? Does your media relations specialist thinks s/he can just ignore interview requests from bloggers?”

Check it out. A very good blog.

A Pleasure … WordPress.com

Thankful and grateful for a chance to experiment with WordPress.com, I think I’ll use this blog for posts specifically about my experiences (and others I’ve found) using WordPress in my classes.

 The platform is perfect for class writing and reflecting exercises.  Whether it be WordPress 1.5.x or WPMU, the WordPress platform is the best I’ve found.

 Thanks for letting me join the discussion here.