RodeWorks

I’ve explored the use of the WordPress multi-user version, WordPressMU, for a couple of projects, and have found it a very promising version. I’m attracted to it, as it offers the possibility of one installation that powers multiple blogs. It also imposes limitations on how extensively each of those blogs can be configured, which is what you want in the typical multi-blog hosted solution its intended for. But most of my projects have their own individual, unique requirements, so I’ve found it doesn’t really serve my regular requirements. But I continue to consider it for implementing wider use of blogs for classroom and project use at the school. Major installations include wordpress.com and blogs.law.harvard.edu . I recently contacted Harvard to learn more about their use, and received a standard reply which contained the following:

WordPress MU is the best system we’ve found. Another alternative is the free software that runs LiveJournal. We did not investigate any non-free blogging platforms. WordPress MU lives at mu.wordpress.org . Unfortunately the release cycle and support are not very professional, but we have not had many problems, provided that we dedicate a bit of time each month to checking for updates, reading the forums to see if any bugs were found, and then applying the updates on a staging site prior to moving them live. There is some non-trivial cost in maintaining a blogs server including occasional community policing, conflict resolution, and software upgrades. Our blogs project no longer has its own funding, but we do not find maintaining the blogs server and upgrading it to be overly burdensome.

Blog spam is a big problem.We used to use a combination of custom banning scripts and the Spam Karma plugin to prevent comment and trackback spam. Now we use Automattic’s Akismet product under an educational license along with a few custom rules and scripts specific to our setup (and mod_security in Apache).

We currently host a few hundred active blogs at any one time (they come and go as students enter and leave and as courses begin and end). As of February 2007, we were serving approximately 250,000 page views per day, or about 7 million views per month. Some of this traffic is podcasts and other large files. In February we served 200GB of content.

Daniel Silverman, System Wrangler, Berkman Center for Internet & Society