Almost four years ago I experimented with what up and until then was pretty much the coolest thing I had done in edtech (pre-ds106, mind you )—though no one else really noticed save the great Brian Lamb. In less than an hour I had cloned and made available the entire UMW Blogs WordPress framwork (including hosting, plugins, themes, and support material) for Longwood University—a fellow Virginia state university—for the low, low cost of a domain. So, in other words, two years of experimentation and iteration packaged up and mapped to greenwoodlibrary.org at the low, low cost of $8.95 for a namepsace. The trick was mapping a network onto UMW Blogs and using the same core files, themes, and plugins as UMW Blogs (I used a much earlier version of David Dean’s Networks for WordPress plugin). These days the process is pretty common, we’re doing it pretty impressively on umw.edu—but in 2008 it was a bit of radical idea. In fact, I had big dreams for it, this is from my post on the experiment … [Read more...]