A few more days into the project and we are faced with the ‘which platform’ decision. WordPress (which I use for my own blog) is IHMO excellent. It provides a wide range of themes, plugins, widgets and more. The initial set up seems to require some serious planning and the value of that planning only comes to fruition when content has been added. It is a fairly straightforward writing tool that is then perhaps compliicationed by categories, tags, pages, Is this the best platform for teachers new to blogging.
This conversation led us to review first, tumblr second, Posterous. Many moons ago, Tumblr was one the first blogging platform I used. It was a very intutitive piece of webware but I grew in confidence, I moved on other tools. In contrast to WordPress, Tumblrs user interface is very simple – a great starting point.
7 simple options for 7 simple posts. A couple of features I like, you can embed a Tumblr, so the potential for tumblrof the week on the school website is possible. Of course there is an APP for that and you can submit posts via email and aggregate tumblr posts to a Twitter or facebook feed (not that we use eother here at Hamble College, yet). Tumblr can be customised and pointed at your own domain (see Stuartridout.com for IT inspiration).
Next much in the news Posterous, apparently ‘Waging war on WordPress.’ I have spent half an hour setting up KristianStill.posterous and in all fairness, it is fairly straight forward. There is a lot of social connectivity, but I am not sure that all the features are needed or wil be employed by the staff. What I do like is the ability to add contributors.
Finally, our E-Resources Manager is keen to look at a centralised Joomla installation. He would like to investigate a tool where staff merely edit the front end and display articles. This way all blogs will be on ht eone site, rather than many sites connected on a blog roll.