Blogs @ William and Mary

Since my last post, I’ve added more functionality. It’s easy to grow when you’re a newborn!

• Farms-spectagular Theme Pack  has increased the number of themes available by a couple orders of magnitude
• Added New/Updated/Active blogs widgets to this metablog
• Changed the theme here. That header image was distractingly huge! This new theme was easily customized with a W&M image to boot

I’ve also contacted the folks at Defensio to double-check where we fit in their licensing scheme. Defensio is a promising alternative to Akismet. Both are automated comment-spam-fighting tools. I’ve used Akismet with great success, but unfortunately for multi-user applications they want a monthly fee. Unless I’m reading the licensing wrong, I think we can use Defensio at no charge unless our host here becomes wildly popular.

There’s still plenty to do, but the lack of problems so far is keeping me excited & hopeful.

Between last night and this morning I’ve tweaked a few more things. It was a neat feeling when two of my colleagues started working on this site right away and I realized that this thing that was just an idea a couple of days ago is already taking its first fledgling steps toward becoming a community!

At first mail notifications weren’t going out, but that’s fixed now. I spent this morning getting the mail system on this server (tribesrv) working properly so if users have trouble I can communicate with them. I also added the signup link you can see at right, since changing the theme from the default removed the WPMU boilerplate. I’m not sure if I’ll stick to this theme for the server blog; I chose it for the W&M-ish color scheme, but the banner picture is too big. Ideally we’ll have something customized that’s all our own…eventually.

Well, I’ve spent the afternoon getting this host up and running. If I (or you) can see this post, then things must have gone at least mostly right. Here’s to beginnings!