The Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Word­Press Ser­vice sup­ports web­sites related to teach­ing, research, and com­mu­ni­ca­tion out­reach for fac­ulty projects and offi­cially rec­og­nized Uni­ver­sity groups and pro­grams. At this time, we do not sup­port indi­vid­ual sites of a non-academic nature (i.e. per­sonal blogs or websites).

Staff or fac­ulty mem­bers who would like a site for their orga­ni­za­tion or project should fill out the Word­Press Site Request form (PU netID login required).

Stu­dent orga­ni­za­tions who need a blog should read the rel­e­vant sec­tion below and then fill out the Word­Press Site Request form as well (PU netID login required).

Those inter­ested in course blogs and per­sonal blogs should read the cor­re­spond­ing sec­tions below.

Stu­dent orga­ni­za­tion blogs

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.

Course blogs

Requests for blogs asso­ci­ated with courses offered at Prince­ton may be requested by fill­ing out the Word­Press Site Request form (PU netID login required). A staff mem­ber from OIT Aca­d­e­mic Ser­vices will cre­ate the course blog within two busi­ness days. The instruc­tors of the course will be added as admin­is­tra­tors of the course blog and will be sent instruc­tions for access­ing and using the course blog.

Per­sonal Blogs

While the Prince­ton Uni­ver­sity Blog Ser­vice does not cur­rently sup­port per­sonal blogs, the Office of Infor­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy (OIT) does pro­vide a PHP/MySQL envi­ron­ment where you can install your own blog soft­ware. OIT Knowl­edge Base arti­cle 1123 has infor­ma­tion on the Per­sonal cPanel ser­vice, a small-scale shared LAMP web envi­ron­ment for indi­vid­ual stu­dents, fac­ulty and staff. Per­sonal cPanel offers the plug-in called Sof­t­ac­u­lous, which quickly installs open source soft­ware such as Word­Press, Dru­pal, and over twenty other util­i­ties and tools to enable web author­ing and con­tent man­age­ment online.

Many exter­nal blog host­ing providers have free or low-cost offer­ings. Pop­u­lar options include Blog­ger (Google Blogs) and WordPress.com.