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.