Blogs

Welcome to College of Charleston Blogs, blogs from the faculty, staff, and administrative departments of the College of Charleston. If you’re a faculty or staff member, you too can get a blog.

Blogs will be down briefly this evening between the hours of 5 and 6 for an urgent software upgrade.

Web Strategies has upgraded College of Charleston Blogs to WordPress 2.8. You should not see any significant differences between WordPress 2.7 and 2.8 as we’ve seen in some previous upgrades. 2.8 mostly adds some refinements and allows us to provide more up-to-date themes and feature enhancements.

Please let us know in comments or via email to webmaster@cofc.edu if you encounter any difficulties with your blog….

The next time you log into your WordPress blog, things will look quite a bit different.  We’ve applied WordPress 2.7 to blogs.cofc.edu, which enables a far greater array of themes and features, especially down the road.  WordPress 2.7 also brings about significant changes in the design of the administration panel.  Fortunately, the mechanics are very much the same.

First, your dashboard will be far more useful. You can now see pending comments, site announcements, and much more right within the dashboard.

Your posting tools are now located in a sidebar along the left rather than in tabs on top like before.  This left sidebar does a better job of grouping related tools than previous versions of WordPress, making posting and other tools easier to find.

If you run into trouble or have any questions, please contact webmaster@cofc.edu.

Information Technology will be bringing the main datacenter down on Sunday, April 19, 2008, to install new generator power.  This downtime will affect the blog server’s availability for several hours that day.  Please see the Information Technology website for more information.

We’re working on adding Akismet‘s spam protection system this morning.  You’ll see some screens about entering an “API key” in your Dashboard for a little while as we work on this.  You can safely ignore these messages, and they should be gone by tomorrow.

Welcome, early adopters, to the College Blog Server, known as blogs.cofc.edu.  The final bits and pieces of construction are being put into place for a launch on Monday to all faculty and staff.  Things are looking good and working well.

I wanted to take a second to thank all of you who have been poking around, giving feedback, and waiting patiently for this to open up.  I wanted to get this going sooner, but semester startup was what it was. 

Looking forward to getting this show on the road Monday!

– Jared Smith, IT Web Strategies