I just started playing around with ELGG - an open source multi-user weblog package. It also claims to do some e-portfolio stuff. It's a really nice app. LDAP is a required feature. It can be deployed on any server you want. Templates are customizable on a per-blog basis (with selection of templates from a list of options, and the ability to create and extend templates).

It mimics Flickr in its use of tags and friends to create webs of content. And it seems to strike a nice balance between complexity and ease of use. It's complex enough to be useful. Simple enough to not be scary.

Toboggan Boy

Originally uploaded by dnorman.

Trying the Flickr Blog This feature...

Hey. that worked pretty well! Easy peasy. Some more-complicated-than-necessary HTML in the new post, but that's not fatal. Cool.

I've just finished installing the Kubrick template for both Drupal and MovableType. The template does a decent job of hiding the complexity inherent in these systems, and looks relatively pretty, too.

In my mind, it's back to a dead-even horse race. The biggest drawback of Drupal was the complexity - too many widgets on the screen, so novices could get easily confused. It's immediate benefits are LDAP authentication, and extremely flexible content types and easy publishing. Drawbacks include the mash-everything-into-one-website-with-multiple-views strategy, where it becomes difficult (impossible?) to create truly unique weblogs as part of the larger system. They all feed into the same content store, and are all displayed via the same interface.

This was Evan last Monday at Kananaskis Village. He loves climbing, and loved toboganning down the side of Mount Kidd even more.

I only posted this to test out the Photon iPhoto plugin. It works, but seems a bit rough with what it does to the new post. Had to come in and clean a bunch of stuff up.

I've been playing around with MovableType to test it out for a potential weblogs@ucalgary rollout. It's really quite nice. I've used MT 2.x before (and it's still running on our main commons.ucalgary.ca webserver), but 3.15 is a nice and polished package. I can't seem to get it to recognize my NetPBM installation to generate image thumbnails, but that's not critical. I also can't seem to get LDAP authentication working, and that's a bit more critical. I'll try to tinker with that when I get time.

I had to write a utility for the Mavericks project to allow me to import asset descriptions that were exported from ContentDM via a tweaked XML format, into a MySQL database for use in Pachyderm authoring. I was going to write a simple python or php script to do it, but realized just how much simpler it would be in WebObjects. Using JDOM to parse the xml into a DOM Document, and then passing the data into an EOEnterpriseObject to be persisted into the database. Access to both libraries made my code insanely simple.

King announced yesterday that he has accepted a position at a company in downtown Calgary. Congratulations, King! You're going to enjoy it. Projects in the Real World are different than University projects in so many ways, and I know King will do well in that environment.

Which leaves me trying to figure out how to fill his chair here in the Learning Commons. Replacing King is just flat out impossible. Anyone who has ever worked with him will attest to that. He is by far the most gifted programmer and all-around-developer that I have ever met (and I've had the distinct pleasure to have worked with him for 4 years now).

Well... I guess the writing's on the wall... Leon Tightlips is about to take over the blogosphere. It was fun while it lasted. I, for one, welcome our new Lightship overlord...

Now, if only Leon Tightfist could have easier-to-type URLs. He might get linked to more often... Oh, yeah, and maybe if he had some meaningful content on his blog. That might help a bit, too... All that's up now is some odd Ali-esque ranting monologue...

I just started a wiki page to store information about the candidates for institutional weblog platforms.

If you know anything about the candidates (or if there are some other real contenders that I've missed) please feel free to contribute!

MultiUserWeblogComparison

UPDATE: Since there seeems to be some serious interest in this topic, I've started a wiki page to compare the packages.

I'm starting to toss some more ideas around for a proposal to kickstart a weblogs@ucalgary.ca project. Ideally, the system would be able to integrate via LDAP to the university's authentication system, so people wouldn't have Yet Another Login to remember. It should also scale to thousands of weblogs.

There are several software candidates I'd like to test a bit more before moving forward: (in no particular order)

OK. The number of Northern Voice posts on my blog today is just silly. I'll just be editing this post to manage that...

Tim Bray's keynote was excellent. He's such a good speaker, and the session was interesting to everyone here. podcast link

Robert Scoble's keynote was ok. Less interesting, than Tim (to me), but still interesting. He talked about his perceived role inside Microsoft as the listener-of-weblogs. Dave Winer tried to phone him during the keynote, and got dissed pretty quicky (Mark Canter tried to get Scoble to answer the call in order to find out wtf happened between him and Adam Cury :-). OK. So Scoble "reads" 1000 rss feeds. Well, he subscribes to them. I still have doubts that he actually reads them in a meaningful way. (update: Robert commented on this post - he actually does read his feeds!) If he does, then he can't have time for literally anything else. I was surprised and impressed about how candid he was about non-MS products. He was talking about word-of-mouth marketing campaigns, and described Firefox's incredible adoption. He said "How did people hear about Firefox? It wasn't from the New York Times. It was when someone said to them 'Hey, there's a new browser that can get rid of these nasty pop-ups!' "

OK.. The conference has been running for only a couple hours, and there are already 150+ photos on Flickr! (including evidence that I am here)

Holy pervasive network, and non-stop publishing of content...