I haven't been posting here much lately, partly because I've decided that weekly work updates are barely interesting to me, much less the general public. The larger distraction, however, has been my efforts lately to get WordPress installed for a variety of ITS projects.

In the past we've used instances of Movable Type (like this one) because it can use it's own Perl scripts to maintain the blog articles as flat text files- no dynamic scripting or database required. This made it the best (and really only) blogging solution, since our web hosting provided neither PHP or MySQL.

This arrangement has worked alright so far, but ultimately MT hasn't been the best solution- MT 2.0 has terrible spam controls (preventing comments) and, ultimately, we risk a license violation when we use it for more than personal blogging.

Now, however, our web systems folks are experimenting with a more complete implementation of PHP, which is a Good Thing tm. This, along with the MySQL instance made available to us by the good folks at ibiblio (thanks guys!), has allowed us the opportunity to try out a few new open source possibilities.

As an example of how we're moving forward with this, see our new Knowledge Management front page. It's nothing fancy now, but just with this we've been able to provide timely and relevant update messages to the KMT application (on the login page), using the easy syndication provided by WordPress. Nice, huh?

Thanks again to the gang at Web Systems and ibiblio for the help! We'll try to Do No Evil…

Update: I'm opening comments, mostly just to see how long it takes to collect some spam. Feel free to make submit your own comments, of course…