Packt publishing has a new WordPress book out:  WordPress MU 2.8: Beginner’s Guide.  WordPress MU, especially with the BuddyPress set of plug-ins, is a powerful and flexible framework that power a company blog or social networking site.   Just check out SUNY’s new Academic Commons for a fantastic example of what can be done with this combination.  WordPress MU 2.8: Beginner’s Guide overall is a good introduction to these tools, and even for an experienced WordPress person I found some useful tips and valuable additions to my WordPress ‘tool belt’.  But the book is also not without its flaws.

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I have been following the Bates Online Media blog for about a year.  They have been blogging as they’ve worked through a pretty dramatic redesign of the college web site.  The fact that is built on WordPress is probably the least important feature (but the WordPress geek in me does thrill just a bit at the news.)  With my eldest now a freshman at Springfield college, we all spent a lot of time as consumers on college sites — and from the user perspective the Bates site is very smartly laid out, and is easy to use.  Nice to see such a great end-result after a careful and productive planning process.

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I travel to work via the Shoreline commuter train, which is undergoing some service disruptions due to track work.  Weeks ago we all got special notices put on every seat on the train explaining the service changes.  A new color coded schedule was created, highlighting the schedule changes.  Certain afternoon trains have had all or part of their routes replaces by bus service, which again had to be planned for.  And at my station the train arrives on a middle track, which renders the new platform useless and requires a ground-level entry into the train — and the platform access steps were all blocked off with redirection signs to the alternate entry point.  Lots of careful planning, lots of time spent in communication and arranging alternate services, to have all ready for a Monday morning start.  So the train arrives, the gate is opened and the train car steps opened — and the first step from the ground to the first train car step is a good 15 – 18″.  For a guy with a 36″ inseam, not much of a step — but for the average rider a pretty big jump.  Was there a portable step stool to help people get on board?  No.  Did people ask the conductor for a step stool?  Yes.  Did people have trouble getting on board?  Yes.  So what happened on Tuesday?

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Twitter’s open API is spawning all sorts of related products and services — many of them with silly names.  TweetDeck, Twibble, etc.  But despite the silly names it seems to me that a large part of Twitter’s success is related to how useful these offshoots are, and how much better they make the Twitter experience.  And for the conference space now comes Twubs.  It is in beta now, but it looks like the conference services will carry some charge in the future.

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According to Stack Overflow’s Joel Spolsky the 9 Building Blocks are:  voting, tags, editing, badges, karma, pre-search, Google is UI, performance and critical mass.  Planning some type of social media app — and who isn’t these days.  Some good ideas here…

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I just finished reading Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows.  I came across the book through my LinkedIn group reading list and I’m glad I did.  “Systems fool us by presenting themselves — or we fool ourselves by seeing the world — as a series of events.”  According to Meadows we all too often react quickly, don’t take time to really understand the problem, and then readjust before the effects of our initial reactions have an effect.  Actions that often destablize and make the situation worse than when we started.

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