WordPress MU ended up failing for my use. Almost all of my students now use blogger.com with 1 student choosing to have me install a wordpress blog for just his use (not WordPress MU; rather, regular WordPress). i wonder if the Buddypress plugin caused my WordPress MU installation to fail? in any regard, my WordPress MU installation was determined to try and create the URLs like this (student_chosen_name.seanlancaster.com/blogging/) but students were not able to post a new entry to this address. i had a blog on this site as well and my blog entries showed up like this: seanlancaster.com/blogging/the_date_entered_and_title or something like that. that method worked, but none of the add-on accounts followed suite. i had made a test account and it worked just fine when i tested things, but i think i made the test account prior to installing Buddypress so who knows? i had to quickly drop the notion of using my own blogs via WordPress MU. ah well.
my university just shifted all student email to Google’s Gmail accounts. everyone has access to Google Docs using these accounts as well. unfortunately, the student Gmail accounts do not include the use of blogger.com. so we hit our second wrench. each student had to sign up for a second Gmail account to then have access to blogger.com. what a hassle. and my university doesn’t give me a Google account through the university so i couldn’t test this stuff out prior to class starting.
in the end, we made it through week 2 and i think there should be some pretty smooth sailing from here on out. i am still contemplating the use of Diigo and maybe twitter, but i’d like to let students get accustomed to the new tools we’re now using first.
September 29th, 2009 at 8:57 am
Yes BuddyPress can cause issues. For standard bloggng you are better sticking with WordPress MU than using WordPress MU/BuddyPress. Would be interesting to see what was happening.
Now getting back on the topic I was intrigued by your comment that ‘some bloggers take a week or more to finally approve comments’ and yes I do plan to respond back on my own blog. But since I would also need to respond to other comments first it is faster to respond here first.
Are there specific type blogs they are writing comment on? Only asking as I might be able to keep an eye out for ones I know are more likely to comment back faster.
September 29th, 2009 at 10:41 am
thanks for the comment Sue. i probably shouldn’t have gone with BuddyPress as well, but it was better to have it fail right away than well into the semester. maybe next semester i’ll venture back to MU.
i have not noticed a pattern as to who responds and who doesn’t. now that you ask, i think i’ll take a look around. it could very well be that my students have found a blog entry that is many months or even years old and the author has no interest in continuing or starting a discussion on old posts? personally, i turn off the ability to comment on older posts for our family blog as it’s typically just spam after about 6 months. but i’ll start keeping note of who fails to approve comments and see if i see a pattern.
September 30th, 2009 at 9:46 pm
Well let me know if you need help with WPMU. Here are links to my articles that will help you with using Site admin and installing.
I get comments on posts on The Edublogger that are almost 2 years old. Those I will respond to but I’m less likely to respond to comments on really old posts on my personal blog.
As a blogger, with also a lot of commitments, responding to comments can be time consuming. Not every blogger is interested in engaging in comment conversations. That is just the nature of the beast.
September 30th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
Thanks Sue — your articles look terrific. I’ll be sure and bookmark that resource when I try and either resurrect my current WPMU site (http://seanlancaster.com/blogging/) or install a new one.