WordPress Frequently Asked Questions.

A series of how-to guides related specifically to the JMSC blogging setup will be posted here. Right now here’s what we have:

(NOTE: The screenshots on these pages have disappeared from the server. Apologies for lack of visuals. We are working to fix the problem and restore the screenshots.)

And from the good folks at Edublogs, we have several very useful audio-visual tutorials:

WHAT IS THIS SYSTEM? The blogging platform we are using is WordPress Multiuser. It is a version of WordPress (the world’s most popular open source blogging software) that enables an organization like ours to host multiple blogs by our members (or by whoever we allow in), on our own servers, without having to ask a techie to do a time-consuming fresh software install for every single blog somebody wants to create.

WHO CAN BLOG HERE? In order to create a blog on this platform you must be given an account by a JMSC staff member who has administrator access. Right now, accounts are only being given to JMSC faculty and staff, and a few other members of the University of Hong Kong community.

CAN STUDENTS BLOG HERE? Right now we are not giving stand-alone blogs to students on this system. Students can become contributors to specific class or project blogs here if they are given access by a faculty or staff member.

WHERE CAN STUDENTS SET UP THEIR OWN BLOGS? If you are a student you can set up your own blog on any number of free services. One is WordPress.com, a free service run by the WordPress people that hosts your blog on a commercial server in the U.S. There is also Uniblogs.org, a free blogging service specially tailored for educators and students, run by Edublogs. Both of these services use the open-source WordPress blogging system. (IMPORTANT NOTE: Blogs hosted on WordPress.com are blocked in mainland China – in other words, you won’t be able to see or access them unless you know how to use a proxy server. So if you want people to see your blog in China and if you want to be able to access it from China, Uniblogs.org is the better option.)

Or you can set it up on one of many thousands of other hosted platforms (which means you don’t have to be geeky enough to install software on your own server), many of which are also free. They include Blogger.com and many others. About.com has a list here and a useful set of blog-related FAQ’s here.