Posted by Webmissy on March 9th, 2007 in Site launch countdown

Aside from the free e-mail account mentioned in the previous entry, HEdCen faculty members and students will also get free hedcen.com/yourname blogs. Not only are the blogs free, they are also ad-free. And we will strive — hard — to always let them remain free and ad-free.

But let’s talk a little more about the blogs. All blogs will run on the Wordpress platform, an open-source content management system (CMS). You’re probably not interested in reading about the technical (geeky) stuff but I’m going to write about them anyway until the text of this entry is at least as long as the photo you see on the left. That’s to make sure that this entry won’t look awkward. Oh… you like that winking yellow bald head, huh? Yes, right, Wordpress blogs come with emoticons which the young (and young at heart) can’t seem to live without.

Where were we? Oh, right, we were talking about Wordpress… Well, we have a special kind of Wordpress installed at Hedcen.Com. We are using WordpressMU which allows the creation of multiple blogs.

Can you create blogs on your own? No, we prefer that each blog be manually created by the web administrator. At least, for now. But once the blog is created for you, you take control of your blog. But to make sure that we don’t break any laws around here, to be on the safe side, student blogs will be supervised by members of the faculty.

You see, blogs are powerful tools but there are rules in blogging. For instance, we can’t take other people’s web content and use them as though they were ours. We can’t write malicious things about other people either — there is a crime called libel. Those are things we’ll talk about more in the near future. For now, just remember that we want the HEdCen blogs to be not only interesting but responsible as well.

Is it going to be a one-blog-one-person kind of arrangement? Ideally, that’s how it should be. But once you have your blog, you can choose to add more users to it. See, each blog can have one or more authors. It’s really up to you.

You may also change the look of your blog with just one click. No hard coding of HTML pages and cascading style sheets (CSS) are necessary (although it’s nice to be able to hard code and read and write all those weird looking tags and codes).

See the little squares in the photo on the left? Those are screenshots of all the currently available templates that you may use on your blog. We may even add more in the future.

Just like Wordpress, these templates (in Wordpress, they are called “themes”) are free. They are released under the GNU General Public License which means they are free to use, distribute and even modify.

What else can Wordpress do aside from making it easy for you to change how your blog looks? Well, you may also create categories and sub-categories to organize your entries better. You don’t get that with your free Blogger and Multiply accounts, do you?

You may also create your very own blogroll so you can have a list of links to your friends’ blogs.

What about photos? Sure, you may upload photos! We’re assuming, of course, that you already know how to crop and resize digital photos so that your template does not break. So, you can embed photos in your blog entries. We’re also looking into integrating a photo album service with your blogs but that’s in the future and we’ll make the announcement when it’s available.

Hey… look at that! I’ve written so much the text is now as long as longer than the photo of the screenshots of the blog themes. I should stop now and reserve the rest for future entries.