Blogs @ William and Mary

Yesterday morning & the evening before I spent some time helping a user upload content to a research blog. The site was rejecting his PowerPoint and Word files, first because they were too big, and then because they were a non-approved file type.

To fix the upload issue, I had to adjust maximum allowed upload sizes in two places in my php.ini: the max_post (how much data can be allowed in any POST transaction) and max_upload (how big an individual file can be) variables. Helpfully, Wordpress’s error message changed to reflect the new parameters that weren’t being met–allowable file types for upload.

To fix that issue, I snagged Peter Westwood’s mime-config plugin for Wordpress, making the change suggested in this thread to keep the plugin from appearing in regular users’ Options tab. I wish there was a global solution, but none of the discussions I could find online suggested a way to do so besides hacking core WordPress files–and even then it was a slightly more complicated endeavor for MU than for regular WordPress. So now I can allow non-default file types to be allowed on a per-blog basis, which is fine for now. I probably should have suggested Swem Library’s D-Space as a document repository, but one reason for it not to occur to me immediately is that I’m not familiar with it yet. Users needing to ask for permission to upload Office documents will serve as a tickler for me to do so as soon as I get the opportunity.

I just wrote a guide to setting up a WMBlogs.net blog to use Defensio to manage comment spam. New (and current) bloggers should definitely do this… it’s only a matter of time before evil spammers find your blog. The plugin is already installed when you create your blog, but you still have to activate it and obtain an API key from Defensio.

We’re getting there!

A couple days ago my boss commented that he’s getting a much different vibe out of me working on this project than he got when I was largely concerned with a pilot program involving tablet PCs running Vista; I retorted that there’s a big difference when all you have to do is follow the directions and stuff works (as opposed to following the directions and stuff doesn’t work anyway…).

The main focus of starting this project is to establish 1) some research bloggers and 2) a “mother blog” focused on undergraduate research at William and Mary that would aggregate posts from our research bloggers and have a public tagging capability so interested readers could help categorize postings. We’re using feedwordpress for aggregation via RSS (the author of which kindly and thoroughly explained to me aspects of its operation); TagThis fits the bill perfectly for audience tagging, and even supports tag-use thresholds and other functions more robust than I’d imagined when I thought about what we’d need to accomplish that.

I got Defensio installed to control comment spam (though I can’t say how well it works yet–so far we’re under the spam radar, though I’m sure that will change any time). The developer was quick to address a dashboard bug that arose since I’ve disabled the Plugins management tab in the dashboard in favor of using Plugin Commander.

I don’t want to sound too fanboyish, but it’s as if WPMU is the Big Rock Candy Mountain of CMS/Blogging systems: whenever I want something, I just reach out and it’s there–and it works! And if it doesn’t, there’s an interested, active base of users and authors who are willing to help. From an admin point of view, there’s not much more gratifying than that.