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Testimonials:
Generations from now, they won't call it the Internet anymore. They'll just say, "I logged on to the Jim Groom this morning.
-Joe McMahon
Everything Jim Groom touches is gold. He's like King Midas, but with the Internet.
-Serena Epstein
My understanding is that an essential requirement of the internet is to do whatever Jim Groom asks of you while you're online.
-James D. Calder
@jimgroom is the Billy Martin of edtech.
-Luke Waltzer
My 3yr old son is VERY intrigued by @jimgroom's avatar. "Is he a superhero?" "Well, yes, son, to many he is."
-Clint Lalonde
Jim Groom is a fiery man.
-Antonella Dalla Torre
“Reverend” Jim “The Bava” Groom, alias “Snake Pliskin” is a charlatan and a fraud, a self-confessed “used car salesman” clawing his way into the glamour of the education technology keynote circuit via the efforts of his oppressed minions at the University of Mary Washington’s DTLT and beyond. The monster behind educational time-sink ds106 and still recovering from his bid for hipster stardom with “Edupunk”, Jim spends his days using his dwindling credibility to sell cheap webhosting to gullible undergraduates and getting banned from YouTube for gross piracy.
I am Jim Groom
Find out more about me here.
Recent comments
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- D'Arcy Norman on Conference, Camera, ILTA!
- Reverend on You’re definitely Dr Detroit …
- Alan Levine on You’re definitely Dr Detroit …
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Recent Posts
- Unscripted Futures
- Conference, Camera, ILTA!
- You’re definitely Dr Detroit …
- The Reclaim Student Showcase Returns for 2026
- Domain of One’s Own Version 2
- Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho, It’s Off to ILTA’s EdTech 26 We Go
- Atari 2600 Game Cartridge Display Stand
- Building a Blog You Can Walk Into
- Deferred Maintenance: Upgrading Mastodon and PeerTube
- Fulci the Psychic
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Contributors
some favorites
- Alan Levine
- Andy Rush
- Audrey Watters
- bava.social
- Bonnie Stewart
- Brian Lamb
- Bryan Alexander
- Chris Lott
- Clint LaLonde
- Cole Camplese
- Darcy Norman
- David Kernohan
- David Wiley
- Gardner Campbell
- GNA Garcia
- Grant Potter
- Jeffrey Keefer
- Jon Beasley-Murray
- Jon Udell
- Kate Bowles
- Kin Lane
- Laura Blankenship
- Leslie Madsen-Brooks
- Lisa M Lane
- Martha Burtis
- Martin Hawksey
- Martin Weller
- Mike Caulfield
- Mikhail Gershovich
- Mountebank
- Paul Bond
- Scott Leslie
- Serena Epstein
- Shannon Hauser
- Stephen Downes
- The OLDaily
- Tim Owens
- Tom Woodward
- Tony Hirst
Category Archives: WordPress
The State of Aggregation at UMW
I’m usually not a whiteboard image blogger, but we’ve been going through some structural work at UMW with various projects and we are having to map things out more and more. One of the things we’ve been working on with … Continue reading
Late to the Party: Migrating an outdated WPMu to WordPress Multisite
The migration process from WPMu (roughly version 2.9.2) to WordPress Multisite (version 3.4.1) has been well documented already. Two sources I found useful for a straightforward tutorial for doing the migration—which I imagine everyone who is anyone has already done … Continue reading
UMW’s Website Showcased by WordPress
I just discovered that UMW’s website is showcased on WordPress.org. UMW has been running WordPress for it’s entire website for almost a year now, and it’s pretty sweet and Cathy Derecki and Curtiss Grymala deserve all the credit. To get … Continue reading
From the Archive: ELS Blogs
This time 5 years ago we were closing down ELS Blogs, UMW’s first multi-user WordPress experiment (well actually the second if you count Lyceum), to make way for the campus-wide blogging platform that would be known as UMW Blogs. Five … Continue reading
The Uses and Limits of Tumblr
I’ve had a tumblr blog since 2007—well before it was cool :)—but never really used it. As I got more into ds106 and creating stuff on the web the design culture coming out of tumblr kept coming on my radar … Continue reading
Integrating FeedWordPress with BuddyPress
I am writing a larger post about open architectures and the implications of what appears to be a more general move away from a focus on open as in sharing, collaboratively building, and collectively designing a space for teaching and … Continue reading
A Ghost in the WordPress Machine: the Self-Referential RSS Feed
I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while now, but I guess the pure absurdity of it has stopped me again and again. But it is time to move beyond that. We’ve been running two major WordPress Multi-Site … Continue reading
Longwood Blogs Moves Out!
Almost four years ago I experimented with what up and until then was pretty much the coolest thing I had done in edtech (pre-ds106, mind you 🙂 )—though no one else really noticed save the great Brian Lamb. In less … Continue reading
UMW Blogs is Full of Rainbows and Unicorns
UMW is gearing up for its accreditation review in 2013. We are part of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools which is one of the six regional accrediting bodies in the US that oversees more than 13,000 public and private … Continue reading

Displaying Distributed Comments on the Hardboiled Blog
One of the nuts of aggregating mother blogs that was tough to crack for a long while was showing the number of comments on posts that were syndicated in. Almost two years ago Martha Burtis cracked that nut for ds106. I’ve … Continue reading →