There has, indeed, been a great awakening on the UMW campus. As of this morning our WordPress Multi-user experiment has over 200 individual blogs, with more than 260 users. I have been away from the bava because I have been manning the trenches. By the end of next week I imagine there will be upwards of 350 blogs and over 400 users (somewhat conservative, in fact).
Now, I’ll be the first to say it, numbers lie and those I am listing above are no different in fact. Acknowledging this freely, even these “stats” wouldn’t be possible if the UMW faculty weren’t so downright awesome! I have to give all the credit to those folks who are earnestly experimenting with this web-based publishing platform as a tool for teaching and learning. More than 30 faculty have taken the challenge, and if we even have a modicum of success, then I challenge any and every university in this fine land to show me a place that is more switched on and serious about fully embracing the digital revolution head on. I am more than proud to be part of the University of Mary Washington community today. And while this grand experiment may fail miserably, I know without question that it was not for lack of trying on the part of faculty, administration, and students alike.
All that said, there is so much I have yet to blog. The experiments on a more granular scale have really been exciting. And a few of them may be downright revolutionary if they deliver on half of what they promise. I will be burning the midnight oil for the next 10 days or so and reporting as much as I can from my embattled foxhole. For remember, there are no atheists in foxholes, just grand visions of what’s yet to come…
Hey Jim —
How is BlueHost holding up under this? It’s a problem I’d like to have, but I’m worried that down the road KeeneWeb may need to move.
But if you are doing this on it successfully, that seems to be a good indication of headroom?
Actually Mike,
I think BlueHost would crash in a heartbeat. We actually have gone through a smaller, boutique hosting service of a friend of mine out in Portland. It’s $40 dollars a month (so a bit more expensive -but not much). Cast Iron Coding is the company.
In fact, the move was for the dynamic subdomains initially, but I don’t think Bluehost could stand up to this kind of use. For example, bavatuesdays (hosted on Bluehost) has been giving me all sorts of CPU quota error messages just today. Making me want to make the move myself from Bluehost! Hosting UMW Blogs at the next level of hosting support was the best thing we did, and if it keeps up with this kind of activity, we are going to need a dedicated server either in-house or hosted. So we are transitioning from more experimental to more “official” -dare I say it?