Yesterday was the last day of the Fall semester so I took a quick screenshot of traffic on UMW Blogs in Google Analytics over the last four months, which looks like this: Which made me think, how does this compare to traffic from the Fall semester last year? So I did a quick filtering for traffic from 8/16/10 through 12/16/11 and what was interesting was how consistent the traffic was between the two time periods in terms of frequency throughout the week, over the weekends, etc. What's more, we had almost exactly 100,000 more visits and unique visitors this Fall than last--with almost 200,000 more pageviews. All of which seems to suggest traffic is settling in given that from Fall 2009 to Fall 2010 trafic almost doubled across the board in terms of visits, unique visitors, and pageviews. The change in traffic this Fall in comparison to Fall 2010 was a more modest 20% growth in visits, 25% growth in visitors, and a little less than 15% in pageviews. I'm not sure … [Read more...]

Sarah Cunnane, writer for the Times Higher Education blog, recently featured UMW Blogs as one of the rare scholarly publishing platforms for a university community that actually cultivates, encourages, and allows for open publishing by anyone in the UMW community. We are proud of this public display of trust, and rather than resulting in a black eye for the institution it has become a mechanism for highlighting the amazing work of faculty and students alike, as well as bringing attention to the great work we do at UMW on a regular basis. The discussion around trust and academic blogging platforms was ignited by a post by Mark Smithers on "Blogging and tust in Universities". He highlighted UMW as a rare example of trust in Higher Education: Now the question is why aren’t universities doing the same thing? To be fair, there are some very good examples of university blogging environments where numerous members of the university run a blog. One of the best known is the University of … [Read more...]

are usually in week two or three by now, but I am not complaining because the extra spell before game time was nice. That said, the semester has arrived and UMW Blogs held up beautifully the first week (even though it got clobbered traffic wise). Martha Burtis did a site re-design which looks snazzy. What's more, Martha re-themed the UMW Wiki to match UMW Blogs, which is something we plan on experimenting with and using a lot more this year. After the upgrade in early August, it seems like UMW Blogs has been rock solid. No downtime, and very little in the way of errors, crashing plugins, rogue themes, etc. The system is tight, and I am not afraid to say it these days. With more than 22,000 unique visitors during week one and over 82,000 page views---all I have to say is bring it on. UMW may be small, we may be relatively poor, but we are scrappy as all hell. What's more we are open education at it's best and least pedantic. … [Read more...]

Image credit: Dok1's "Spam" After about 3 years with Akismet on UMW Blogs we switched over to TypePad Antispam so that UMW would no longer be breaking the new licensing for Akismet---under which we would be paying $750 a month for this spam filter on a multi-site installation with 5000+ blogs (actually that quote was for 4000+ blogs back in December 2010). We were more than willing to pay something for Akismet, but the $750 figure was too rich for our blood. I understand no free lunch and all---the liberterian mantra---but that quote seemed rather extreme. I know others have tried to work out something with Akismet, and I'm not sure where that went, but I can't see how small public colleges like mine where the WordPress blogging platform is an experiment and an afterthought can come up with $10,000 a year for spam protection. We operate on a shoe-string budget and pay less than what Akismet wanted for spam filtering to host and backup all of UMW Blogs. The sad thing is that anyone who … [Read more...]