Blogging

From ETS

Blogs@psu is a project which aims provide a blogging platform to all Penn State students, faculty, staff. The blogs@psu is currently powered by SixApart's Movable Type software. This product was chosen due to its rich feature set and its ability to publish static files into user's personal web space. All students, faculty, and staff have had web space available. Blogs@psu aims to provide an straightforward means of utilizing this space. Rather than having to possess moderate knowledge of HTML, FTP, and CSS to publish content onto the web, users of blogs@psu can create content for their personal web space with a simple wysiwyg web-based editor and publish with a click. Blogs@psu also contains a web-based file upload tool and asset manager for multimedia files or other attachments.

Deploying the blog platform on top of PSU personal webspace creates a more scalable solution since every request does not require a dynamically generated page. This solution also allows the blogs@psu to leverage the existing file system tools (quota, access control management) and usage policies.

Blogs@psu is also a platform for podcasting. Any blog feed that contains links to audio or video files attached automatically becomes a podcast feed.

The Penn State e-portfolio website now highlights blogs@psu as a portfolio tool.

Contents 1 Getting Started with blogs@psu 2 Examples of websites built with blogs@psu 3 Examples of courseware built with blogs@psu 4 Milestones 5 The Future of blogs@psu 5.1 Blogging and Protected Space 5.2 Upgrade to Movable type 4.2 5.3 Aggregation of Content 6 Current Issues with Movable Type 7 Brainstorming Ideas

Getting Started with blogs@psu

• http://blogs.psu.edu/ - blogs@psu
• http://blogger.psu.edu - blogs@psu community. Help documentation, forum to discuss blogging@psu, announcements about the service.
• http://blogger.psu.edu/directory - directory of self-selected blogs at psu.

Examples of websites built with blogs@psu

• PHIL 083 blog - Professor Christopher Long's class blog
• Dr. Laura Guertin's e-Portfolio
• Ellysa Cahoy's Portfolio
• Tina Hay's Alaska Adventure 2007
• Presentation delivered via the Blogs at PSU

Examples of courseware built with blogs@psu

• Course Topic in a Blog Example of what an topic of instruction could look like in the Blogs at PSU
• Master Course Space Example of a "Master Course" in the Blogs at PSU. The Master Course could be an Open Courseware component that could be easily moved around to other users' blogs via a simple export/import function.

Milestones

• July 4th weekend - blogs@psu migrated to gpfs. Change should be transparent to users.
• We need to be ready to implement this for Fall 2008
  • Classes begin 8/25/2008

The Future of blogs@psu

Blogging and Protected Space

With the launch of protected personal web space, we must modify the blog software to give users the option to publish into their protected space. This alone is not difficult and we have had the option working in our staging environment for some time. However problems arise from the fact that even though the published content is protected, Movable Type does not understand what content is meant to be public and what content is meant to be protected. So, even if you publish content into your protected web space, that content could still be found on various dynamically generated pages such as blog searching, both by the public and on the Movable Type dashboard. We are not interested in hacking the core of the Movable Type to provide this functionality, as maintaining a fork of the code would prove to be too onerous. We are currently looking at developing a protected blogging plugin to provide this functionality. We had previously thought about moving to system of individual Movable Type instances, but have abandoned that option due to difficulty in maintaining a custom system.

Upgrade to Movable type 4.2

Movable Type 4.2 is currently at Release Candidate 3.

• MT 4.1 changelog
• What's new in MT 4.2

Tasks:

• install a a copy for testing. investigate every user interface screen, see what is new, make sure everything makes sense for our environment
• add our customizations to the 4.2 code
• mt 4.2 is running on dev with the same customizations we added to 4.0
• add any new customizations that may be needed based on features are are new in MT 4.2
  • change default blog templates so that threaded comments actually display threaded.
    • http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/appendices/tags/commentreplies.html
    • http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/appendices/tags/commentrepliesrecurse.html
    • http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/appendices/tags/ifcommentparent.html
    • http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/appendices/tags/ifcommentreplies.html
• update documentation on blogger.psu.edu

Aggregation of Content

We are at the early stages of thinking about this. Some sort of tool to aggregate content and offer different views in to the content. Perhaps the idea of social rating systems ties into this. Users would have to take some sort of manual action to add their blog feed to this aggregation service. Content could be filtered in various ways, controlled by the user. Examples: "recent videos from IST", "Most popular recent content dealing with Agriculture", "Blog posts about PHIL 083, Section 2"

Current Issues with Movable Type

• protected blogging
• Users Cannot delete blogs. Starting in MT 4, only admin users have the ability to delete blogs. If users can create a blog, then they should be able to delete it. See open ticket here: http://bugs.movabletype.org/default.asp?80065_5b32
• How do we remove users and their data from the blog system once they move on from the University? Need an automated process.
• Comments and WebAccess. BasicAuth.pm doesn't work with comments. Users get a useless MT login screen. The screen is useless because users don't have an MT login, they use the web server auth. There is also no way to disable comment authentication across the board. We have made a few hacks to made BasicAuth work with comments.
• If a user's only role in a blog is commenter, then that blog should not appear in that user's blog list.

Brainstorming Ideas

• How about a statement to the user in the Design | Styles UI that clicking on "Apply Design" after selecting a theme will not necessarily make the new style visible on the blog right away. User will need to refresh cache if this is the case.
• How about a way to make blog URL's more user friendly. Users could assign a unique alias (aliases available on a first-come, first-serve basis) to their blog. We could have a domain that forwards these aliases to the appropriate blog. For example: blogs.psu.edu/brad could forward to www.personal.psu.edu/bak147/blogs/brad.