Blog Pilot Project Management

I talked on the Phone today with Shane Nackerud of The UThink: Blogs at the University of Minnesota via the phone today. My notes are below.

Multiple Authors: This seems to be just a built in function of their movable type. They seem to have more permissions options than the three ones we have when creating a new user. Shane is going to send me a screenshot and add me as a guest into their blog system. I'll have to do some more research to figure out what is going on. This does not seem to be functionality provided by any plugin they have installed.

Apache requires user authentication to access mt.cgi only. The other mt scripts, like comments and search are not protected.

The pages that list categories, posts, blogs, photos, etc from all the blogs were pages written in php that query the MT database.

They don't have any mechanism for integrating commenting and University authentication, but this has apparently never caused a problem and most of the blogs created are for class use.

Spam is a constant struggle. They use Captchas, MTCloseComments, MT-Akismet in addition to mt-spamlookup. Spammers will keep coming, but they never generated so much traffic that they caused the service to slow or stop. UThink publishes traffic stats for their server. Looking at April 2007, I see 175171 hits on mt-comments.cgi, which gives an idea of how much traffic they are dealing with, including spam.

THe UMN blog service is run on a single IBM 3.4 GHz HS 20 Blade.

UThink has 10,583 authors, but not all of them are active. This Summer there are 520 active blogs. During Fall and Spring there are usually around 800-1000 active blogs.

UThink runs the Multiblog plugin. Looks useful.