This month, UMass Amherst IT performs maintenance on WordPress, the software behind Blogs at UMass Amherst.
Blogs at UMass Upgrade, Theme and Plugin Changes
Category: Blogs
UMass Blogs Quota Increased
As of October 30, 2009, you have 100 MB of space allotted to your blog. This increased quota, the previous quota was 50 MB, will allow you to store more images, videos, and other files with your blog. Enjoy! Faculty can contact the OIT Help Desk for information about increasing their quota beyond 100 MB. More on…
Tracking Visitors to your Blog with Google Analyitcs
If you’ve set up a UMass Blog to document your research or teaching, you might be interested to know who your visitors are. The days of the simple hit counter are gone, replaced with Google Analytics, a Google tool that tracks a wealth of data about where your visitors are coming from, which sections of your blog they are reading, and…
Blogs as Coursesites: Spring 2009
Tried building a web site from scratch but never quite finished? Never have the time to slog through programs like Dreamweaver to update your existing site? Maybe setting up a blog is the answer. Many instructors are finding blogs to be a friendlier alternative to building a traditional course website. The UMass Blogs service provides a space…
Major Upgrade to Blogs at UMass Amherst Planned for Jan. 7
The Office of Information Technologies (OIT) will be performing a major upgrade to our Blogs at UMass Amherst service on Wednesday, January 7, 2009. The new version of Blogs comes with big improvements to the software’s interface and a revised list of supported themes, widgets, and plugins. more…
What Makes for a Good Blog (A list by Merlin Mann)
Though Merlin Mann is not an academic, he writes about technology, productivity, and finding time to be creative. All in ways that I think would be of interest to any of us who do things like writing and thinking for a living. He has assembled an interesting list of the important components of an engaging…
Why Bother Blogging?
Blogging certainly takes time, one of the most valuable commodities to those of us in Academia. More than one instructor I’ve chatted with this semester has told me they played with setting up a blog, but “who has the time to keep it going?” That’s a hard statement to argue with, but Henry Jenkins, professor…
UMass Blogs Activity
Nick and Michele just finished pulling together some data on the use of the UMass Blogs service for the Fall semester: 72 instructors have attended one of our recent blogging workshops! Of the almost 300 blogs that have been worked on this semester, there are: 54 course blogs (see some examples) 11 faculty professional/research blogs…
Blogs as Coursesites: Fall 2008 Course Blogs
Tried building a web site from scratch but never quite finished? Never have the time to slog through programs like Dreamweaver to update your existing site? Maybe setting up a blog is the answer. Many instructors are finding blogs to be a friendlier alternative to building a traditional course website. The UMass Blogs service provides…
Getting Started with Blogs in September
We have added a “Getting Started with Blogs” workshop to our September workshop list. It is scheduled for Wednesday September 17th 1:20-3:20. If you are looking for an easy way to build a web presence for a course or your research the UMass Blogs tool is worth exploring! Registration is online at: http://www.umass.edu/accoprod/workshop/register.php
August 2008 Faculty Workshops
Academic Computing is offering several workshops this month on using SPARK and the UMass blogs system. Workshop topics include: Building a new course from scratch in SPARK Working with the grade book in SPARK Creating a research or professional blog Using a blog as a course website To view the schedule and register for workshops…
Blogs for Courses
This February, OIT introduced a Blogging service to the campus in a low-key beta release (meaning that we didn’t advertise it and we tell all users that policies and features may change by the time it is officially released.) In the first month we had over 500 blogs created. Most seem to be “hello world”…