I have to give some love to the work Esther White is doing with WPMu at Smith College Blogs, it is well worth a look. She has shared her process for customizing the front page, which details some very cool hacks. Moreover, today she posted about using WPMu as a space for faculty bio pages and personal blogs/sites.
I just met with some folks from College Relations to talk about how they could use WordPress for faculty bios, which got me totally amped! They want to make faculty responsible for updating their own bios, which was being done with Adobe Contribute, with much resistance from the faculty….We settled on this for a plan: College Relations folks will administer a Faculty blog with one page for each faculty member with a bio….Faculty members can also update their personal pages/blogs and link back to them from their bio’s on the Faculty blog if they’re into that sort of thing. We also discussed ways to get the RSS feed from their personal blog to show up on the bio page….
Very cool stuff, and the plugin for bringing in faculty RSS feeds may very will be aggr. It’s this kind of thing that just further reinforces how useful it is to share what happens in our work regularly. Moreover, it illustrates how key it is for colleges to have a simple, powerful publishing application that will allow this to happen more readily. Looks like Esther is taking care of this for Smith College, so bully for her.
Thanks for the tip — aggr looks like exactly the thing I’ll need once this starts rolling and faculty setup personal blogs (or course blogs that they want to syndicate in their official profiles).
And, as always, thank you for the support!
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