Blogs at UMass Amherst Unavailable Jan. 8, 2009

OIT will be performing a major upgrade to our Blogs at UMass Amherst service on Thursday, January 8, 2009. To complete the upgrade, Blogs at UMass Amherst will be unavailable from midnight on January 7 to midnight on January 8, 2009. We have postponed the upgrade by one day due to the inclement weather forecast for January 7.more…

Bye Bye Beta – Blogs at UMass Amherst Now an Official OIT Service

After eight months of testing, we are releasing Blogs at UMass Amherst to the campus community. This means that OIT Help Services will now be officially supporting this service.

Thanks to all of the early adopters who sent us their comments. Based on your feedback, we made the following changes:

  • Blogs at UMass Amherst Directory: Many beta testers wanted a way to browse all of the blogs on our server. We developed a directory you can sort by last updated date, title, and number of posts, among other blog attributes. All blogs appear in the directory automatically. If you don’t want your blog to appear in the directory, you can opt-out.
  • New UMass Theme: If you’ve used Blogs at UMass Amherst before, you may have searched around a bit to find the perfect theme — one that allowed you to customize your blog, without being overly complicated or scary. We think we’ve developed just the theme. UMass Kubrick, allows you to upload your own header, change the background color and change the type/type size.
  • More Instructions: We created animated Flash-based tutorials to go along with our “Getting Started with Blogs at UMass Amherst” handout; we’ve also developed a handout especially for faculty, “Using a Blog as a Course Web Site”. See our Get Help page for a full list.
  • Themes and Widgets: Based upon user feedback, we added (and removed) several widgets and themes. When making the decision to keep or delete a widget or theme, we asked ourselves…Does it work? Is it secure? Is it easy-to-use? If we answered “yes” to all of these questions, the widget/theme got to stay.

Keep your feedback coming! To tell us your likes and dislikes, please contact the OIT Help Desk. In the future, we will only be adding features to Blogs at UMass Amherst during major upgrades, about twice a year.