A blog is tra­di­tion­ally just a web­site with a selec­tion of recent arti­cles on the main page and links to chronologically-sorted arti­cles in a side­bar. Blog authors and admin­is­tra­tors usu­ally cre­ate con­tent and man­age the site through a web browser instead of a ded­i­cated desk­top application.

Pro­gram­mers of blog soft­ware soon dis­cov­ered that it made sense to add other cri­te­ria for sort­ing, such as tags and cat­e­gories. Also, some items of con­tent made more sense as hier­ar­chi­cally orga­nized pages. No longer lim­ited to just sim­ple arti­cles with titles, blogs can now even facil­i­tate post­ing of cus­tom struc­tured con­tent types, such as sta­tus updates, asides, FAQs, how-tos, gallery posts, recipes, reviews, video diaries, etc.

If a site calls itself a blog, site vis­i­tors expect to have the option to inter­act with the post authors and/or other site vis­i­tors via a com­ment system.

A site pow­ered by a blog con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem can be indis­tin­guish­able from one dri­ven by an enter­prise con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem, and the answer to “what’s a blog?” becomes more nebulous.

Excel­lent ques­tion. We plan to cre­ate a com­par­i­son table in the near future.

Please con­tact if you are unsure about what direction to take with your upcoming website projects.

Please read the instruc­tions on our Request a Site page. We sup­port web­sites related to teach­ing, research, and com­mu­ni­ca­tion out­reach for fac­ulty projects and offi­cially rec­og­nized Uni­ver­sity groups and programs.

We are cur­rently only offer­ing blogs to Uni­ver­sity depart­ments, pro­grams, offi­cial stu­dent orga­ni­za­tions, offi­cial stu­dent pub­li­ca­tions, fac­ulty, and fac­ulty research groups.

If you want to set up a per­sonal blog, your best bet would be third-party host­ing ser­vices like WordPress.com or Blog­ger (Google Blogs).

You could also install Word­Press in your Cen­tral File Sys­tem account and use the Web­Script PHP learn­ing envi­ron­ment.

Through spe­cial arrange­ment with Office of the Dean of Under­grad­u­ate Stu­dents, the blog ser­vice is avail­able to all offi­cially rec­og­nized stu­dent orga­ni­za­tions and pub­li­ca­tions, includ­ing those spon­sored by ODUS, ORL, and PACE. ODUS serves as both the pri­mary admin­is­tra­tive con­tact and sup­port con­duit for stu­dent orga­ni­za­tions that may desire a blog site.

It is against Uni­ver­sity pol­icy to col­lect ad rev­enue (affil­i­ate pro­grams, Adsense, or other pay-per-click ser­vices) from pages served off of Uni­ver­sity servers. An exter­nally hosted solu­tion is the best option for orga­ni­za­tions that wish to gen­er­ate money from their websites.

OIT Aca­d­e­mic Ser­vices will set up a Word­Press blog for a course at the request of the instruc­tor. How­ever, the self-service inter­ac­tive tools built into Black­board 9.x might be, in some cases, a more desir­able option for course blogs.

The Black­board learn­ing man­age­ment sys­tem pro­vides tools for cre­at­ing jour­nals or blogs. Jour­nals, accord­ing to Black­board, are “per­sonal writ­ing spaces for self-reflection or per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tion with the instruc­tor.” A blog is a “com­men­tary avail­able for class review and com­ment.” Each has dif­fer­ent options for indi­vid­ual and group author­ship and also options for shar­ing posts with the entire class or just the instructor.

The first key dif­fer­ence between the plat­forms is pri­vacy. Access to Black­board blog con­tent is restricted to instruc­tors and stu­dents enrolled in a course. Black­board, Inc., con­sid­ers that open­ing stu­dent course work to the out­side world might vio­late pri­vacy laws, and they choose to make Black­board a closed sys­tem. While it is pos­si­ble to restrict access for Word­Press blog con­tent to a members-only group, the Word­Press plat­form is geared toward pub­lish­ing con­tent for a wider audience.

The sec­ond key dif­fer­ence is that Black­board blogs and jour­nals are sub­sec­tions of the Black­board course site. They have direct Grade Cen­ter inte­gra­tion, and they lever­age the Registrar’s enroll­ment data for access control. WordPress blogs have no direct inte­gra­tion with Black­board or enroll­ment data. An instruc­tor could just cre­ate a click­able link to an exter­nal Word­Press site within a Black­board course site; how­ever, each enrolled stu­dent must man­u­ally be added as an author of the Word­Press site.

OIT’s Black­board FAQ page has more details about Black­board blogs and Black­board jour­nals.

Six Apart’s Mov­able Type was once the pre­mier blog pub­lish­ing sys­tem, with rev­o­lu­tion­ary, industry-leading fea­tures, includ­ing unri­valed mul­ti­site sup­port. How­ever, they alien­ated their user com­mu­nity with a con­tro­ver­sial licens­ing change in 2004, an arguably mis­han­dled release of ver­sion 5 in 2010, and a dis­con­cert­ing reor­ga­ni­za­tion later that year.

Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity main­tained an enter­prise license with Six Apart for four years. How­ever, the high cost of the yearly license became dif­fi­cult to jus­tify, and the dimin­ish­ing base of users and devel­op­ers greatly con­cerned us. A Japan­ese IT com­pany now owns the Mov­able Type prod­uct, and another com­pany has assumed respon­si­bil­ity for world­wide tech­ni­cal sup­port. We have no expe­ri­ence with either of these organizations.

While a small com­mu­nity of devel­op­ers is stead­fastly work­ing to keep Mov­able Type alive, and the plat­form may once again flour­ish in one form or another; we felt that it was time to move on.

The Word­Press plat­form is a sta­ble, inno­v­a­tive pub­lish­ing sys­tem with a vast library of third-party plu­g­ins and themes. It pow­ers over 60 mil­lion web­sites, includ­ing 22% of new active domains in the United States. An expan­sive, vibrant com­mu­nity of Word­Press users and devel­op­ers are con­tin­u­ally improv­ing the soft­ware, offer­ing sup­port, writ­ing tuto­ri­als, and shar­ing best prac­tices. We look for­ward to fos­ter­ing an active com­mu­nity of Word­Press users within Princeton.

If your entries (posts) are all just text and sim­ple HTML code, we can import the XML export file from Mov­able Type into your new Word­Press site.

With rich media blogs, we need to use Mov­able Type’s backup tool. We will cre­ate the archive and upload it to a tem­po­rary direc­tory on the Word­Press server. Then we will use the Mov­able Type Backup Importer plu­gin. This will cre­ate a local copy of all images, con­vert sim­ple embeds to oEm­beds, and pre­serve tags, cat­e­gories, and comments.

Pages will have to be recre­ated manually.

We will not bring over any of the pre-fab Mov­able Type themes. Your best bet is to start with a fresh Word­Press theme. We will work closely with site own­ers who have highly cus­tomized themes.

Ide­ally, we will have migrated our last blog out of the Mov­able Type envi­ron­ment by Sep­tem­ber 2012. We will not shut down the Mov­able Type server until the last active blog is either migrated to Word­Press, migrated to a third-party plat­form, or archived to a sta­tic website.

The Word­Press Codex is the offi­cial doc­u­men­ta­tion site for WordPress.

The Uni­ver­sity pur­chased a site license for the entire Lynda.com online train­ing library, which includes over 20 hours of Word­Press 3 train­ing. Visit lynda.princeton.edu and log in with your Prince­ton net ID to access their library from anywhere.

We also have a University-wide license for Safari Books Online. This ser­vice has at least a dozen books ded­i­cated to Word­Press 3.

This web­site, blogs.princeton.edu, will be a resource for train­ing mate­ri­als that are spe­cific to our envi­ron­ment, includ­ing plugin-specific tutorials.

The pro­duc­tion Word­Press servers are locked down, secure environments.

Web Devel­op­ment Ser­vices tests all themes and plu­g­ins for secu­rity prob­lems, com­pat­i­bil­ity prob­lems, user expe­ri­ence issues, and per­for­mance issues before deploy­ing them to the live servers.

With over 16,000 plu­g­ins and 1,400 themes on WordPress.org alone, not all of them play nicely with each other or with the lat­est ver­sion of Word­Press. Not all are designed for a mul­ti­site envi­ron­ment, and some can kill per­for­mance on high traf­fic servers.

Word­Press, itself, and all plu­g­ins and themes are uploaded to a sep­a­rate version-controlled repos­i­tory, then deployed via scripts to the QA and pro­duc­tion web servers. This allows us to roll back to a pre­vi­ous ver­sion of the envi­ron­ment with a sin­gle com­mand if we dis­cover a prob­lem­atic plu­gin or theme.

We tried to mimic many of WordPress.com’s fea­tures, and we have added many other plu­g­ins based on early feedback.

To sim­plify the inter­face for casual users, not all plu­g­ins are acti­vated across the net­work. Site admin­is­tra­tors can acti­vate cer­tain plu­g­ins just for their site. These include a Poll/Survey plu­gin, an FAQ plu­gin, and a LaTeX plugin.

We wel­come sug­ges­tions for added func­tion­al­ity and new themes to add to our Word­Press envi­ron­ment. Please use the Con­tact link above.

As long as your site is active and does not vio­late Uni­ver­sity poli­cies, we will con­tinue to host your site. How­ever, if your site has been inac­tive for three (3) years, we reserve the right to remove your site from our servers.

We ask that each site request des­ig­nates an admin­is­tra­tive con­tact and a tech­ni­cal con­tact. These des­ig­nated indi­vid­u­als become the site owner(s). Before delet­ing an inac­tive site, we will attempt to con­tact a site owner. If none of the des­ig­nated site own­ers are still with the Uni­ver­sity, we will con­tact another indi­vid­ual within the admin­is­tra­tive contact’s for­mer depart­ment. If your site has a spon­sor orga­ni­za­tion, such as the Office of the Dean of Under­grad­u­ate Stu­dents or Prince­ton in Asia, we will also coor­di­nate with that organization.

With the site owner, we will dis­cuss options for archiv­ing an inac­tive site’s con­tent before remov­ing it from our servers.