I went to a school meeting last night where where there was a presentation on “Virtual Learning Environment” Collaboration to you and I

The teacher doing the talk was saying how kids use IT, is very different to adults

20% of his Year9 class has had a online chat with someone in a different countrty this week
20% had posted to youtube this year
80 % had watched a youtube this week
Then he said, i want make a comparision
Everyone to stand up, (Parents and governors, 50 ish total )
He then Said

Sit down if you Don’t use email? No one sat down !
Sit down if you are not carrying a mobile phone, Three sat down
Sit down if you Don’t use MSN? A few more sit down.
Sit down if you Don’t use facebook/myspace? A few more sit down.
Sit down if you Don’t have a blog

Hmmmm, only TWO left standing, Me and a Teacher…..

Following on from Outbreak of wordpress, it must be contagious and WordPress MU in a Corporate environment

WordPress MU is now a Live service inside BT, for all employees to use !

The platform is currently a single, yet rather large linux VM running WordPress MU 1.3.3 with the LDAP auth plugin into the Corprate AD.
as the need and used grows this will be fronted by a cookie insert load balancer and more apache/php instance

• The front page includes some blog guidelines and a few a few MU plugins
• Recently update blogs
• New blogs
• Top Bloggers (quantity not quality)
• Global Tag cloud

We have also …

• Disabled the self registration system, as by default wordpress MU gives you a blog name based on your username( a meaning less 9 didgit number in our case).
• Enforced logon for comments on all blogs, and modified the PHP to prevent anyone changing that
• Pre loaded the WP_users table with ALL employees, so no registration is required for a User account (require for comment), LDAP to the AD deals with password policies
• User Blog are (Currently Manualy) created using the email address prefix, replacing “.” with a “_” for john.smith@ get a blog called john_smith
• Group Blogs what ever name they wish (within reason)

Here starteth my new project,

A New blog dedicated to  my warped view of technology , it’s use and abuse, news, discoveries etc etc and within my limited command of my mother tongue, the english language, it should present a professional picture of my life and the technology that infects it.

Some technology related blogs have been imported from my “personal” Blog , Hence apparent 2 years of history

This new project is stood up on wordpress MU (multi user) 1.3 which gives me the ability to offer blog microsites to like minded individuals. WordPress MU 1.3 is based on the WordPress 2.3.1 core, including native support of Tags and Tag Clouds, providing yoiu have a supporting themes, (so i guess i need to fix this theme to get the tags worksing correctly)

Watch this space

I have just spent several hours trying to setup wordpress MU 1.2.4 with LDAP in to a CORP Active Directory,

MU does what wordpress does best, it just worked
LDAP auth was fantasic,
but everynow and then i was experiancing a 30 secs slow page load

Well before some of you start shouting, what i now know are obvious things,
I eventually noticed, using a cool tool called ieHeaders, that the page load delay was exactly 30 seconds every time, so came to the conclusion this was a timeout rather than a random thing. After some head scratching I remembered that some of the admin pages on wordpress get data from wordpress.org on NEW features etc

Eureeka, give the PHP http client (snoopy) a proxy server to use and everyones a winner !

[update]
This was done with?? wordpress MU 1.2.4 , and LDAP plugin 1.2.0 from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=196841??against a WINDOWS AD / LDAP
The search and user DN need to be in this format OU=aaaa,OU=bbbb,DC=zzzz,DC=yyyy,DC=xxx
where the number number of OU fields and DC fiesl will vary depending on yoiu LDAP config

i am currenlty sat in a MS building using the Guest wireless internet, updating my LAMP blog !