Paul and I just had a brief meeting to discuss what we wanted to do about this. We decided that the best thing to do would be to set if free, and see if anyone on campus starts fiddling with it.
It’s a beta, and we’ll be experimenting with the best setup of modules and content, but the only way to know if this boat will float is to put it into the water. So…
weblogs.ucalgary.ca is on the air.
Anyone with a valid University of Calgary email address can go ahead and login – a blog will be set up automagically for you – and start creating content.
It’s still got some quirks to iron out, but the blogging part works pretty well. I’ll figure out some of the quirks when I get a chance, and many other improvements are in the works when Drupal 4.6 is released.
Why use this rather than something like Blogger, or Typepad, or something else? The biggest benefit (at least initially) is the ability to create ad-hoc organic groups, where content that is published by group members is displayed on a “group page” – an easy way to collaborate with a research group, a breakout group that’s part of a class, or a department.
I’m planning on conducting some workshops around blogging (and collaborative publishing, and RSS, and wikis, and….) when my projects calm down a bit (perhaps this summer?).
If you have any questions about it, please let me know.
I just had a brief snoop around, D’Arcy, and I have to say WOW! Congrats on a job well done.
Man that was fast…
Yeah. The funny thing is that when I first posted about this, there _wasn’t_ a weblogs.ucalgary.ca project (I’m not sure there is even now 🙂 – we just decided to go ahead and put something up, to see what happened.