Wordpress 2.5 Released
I’ll be honest - I’ve been a Movable Type guy since, what, 2000? I’ve been blogging with it at home for that long, and we use it at Allegheny as well. It’s always worked and their version 4 software has been nice.
When I first had the idea for this site, I wanted to use it as a learning opportunity and decided to use Wordpress as the blogging platform. Thanks to Dreamhost’s one-click install, I was up and running in moments.
Thus far, I’m very, very impressed with Wordpress. It’s so easy to use and customize, and the thing I enjoy the most are the plug-ins. What was tough to do in MT is so easy in WP. There are plug-ins for just about everything and I’ve tried a bunch including one to handle RSS feeds and send them to Feedburner, one for making SEO stuff a no-brainer, and one to publish Google sitemaps automatically.
This weekend, Wordpress released version 2.5 of their software. Again, it was a simple upgrade thanks to Dreamhost and so far, things have just worked. The interface has been refined and things have been made a bit more simpler. All around, a great update. I’m sure there is a ton of work that’s been done in the guts of the application, and I think over the next few days I’ll try to explore those more.
The more I use WP, the more I wonder if it could be used as a CMS for a school. It’s so much easier to use then content management systems I’ve looked at (and I’ve been looking lately). A platform like the Wordpress MU seems to have a lot of CMS features built-in: mutliple authors, permissions, blogging and editing “pages.” Are any campuses out there using Wordpress as a CMS? It’s certainly a cost-efficient solution.
If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to my RSS feed!
Bringing the cloud to eduWEB!
We’re bringing the thunder cloud to eduWEB!
After having such a good time at HighEdWebDev ‘07 presenting about the Facebook platform, my colleague Josh Tysiachney and I are packing up the show and bringing it to eduWeb in July. I’ve never been to eduWEB, and now that the schedule has been posted, it looks like a great conference. I’m glad to see some technical sessions there.
Josh and I will be presenting a session called “Head in the Cloud: On-Demand Solultions for Processing, Storage and Content Delivery Needs” on Tuesday, July 22 at 9:45 am. In this session, we’ll explore the possibilities for IHE’s when it comes to content delivery, off-site processing and more. Here’s a quick snippet:
On-demand services like cloud computing, storage, and content delivery have become near commodities in their pricing and scalability, and implementing them may be easier than you think. It’s a win for you, it’s a win for your institution, and it can take a significant load off of your already stressed IT resources.
We’ve been using the “cloud” at Allegheny College for nearly a year. This presentation will showcase our implementation of this exciting technology, focusing especially on Amazon’s Web Services offerings.
We hope to see you there - stay tuned here for more information about the session as we work on the presentation.
I’d like to tape some video interviews with some great higher ed web people about stuff you’re doing and get your takes on technology. Brad? Matt? Kyle? Karine?
If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to my RSS feed!
Amazon adds new features to EC2
Ok, I swear, I don’t secretly work for Amazon, but I probably should seeing how I talk about them so much here. Today, Amazonannounced two new features as part of their Elastic Computing Cloud program.
First, elastic IP addresses. For an extra cent an hour, you can have more control over the IP address related to your EC2 instance. This is huge. Now you can load-balance or point certain processes over to EC2 and be able to work with a known IP address.
Second, you can now specify where your EC2 instance lives. This will allow you to manage downtime or other faults by quickly kicking over to another data center if need be.
Availability Zones give you additional control of where your EC2 instances are run. We use a two level model which consists of geographic regions broken down into logical zones. Each zone is designed in such a way that it is insulated from failures which might affect other zones within the region. By running your application across multiple zones within a region you can protect yourself from zone-level failures.
Third, you can now specifiy what kernel you’d like to run. I assume many developers have written code for a certian kernel or only want to work on certain kernels, and now they can specify which kind they’d like.
Here’s some more feedback from around the blogosphere today: here and here.
Rightscale has also posted some tutorials on how to use the new features, including how to set up a fault-tolerant site.
If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to my RSS feed!
