I recently implemented a new design for the homepage for our installation of WordPress MultiUser– Blogs@Baruch.

I tried to accomplish a few things with this redesign.  Mostly, I wanted to update the look of the site… the previous version was a bit clunky, a bit 2003 1999, and I didn’t feel it was popping.  As I usually say when Mikhail critiques my design (which is often): I’m no great aesthete, and certainly not a graphic artist.  But I think this version is markedly better, cleaner, and more inviting.  2008.  2009, even.

The inviting part is really the key, because we’d like to make this page not just a portal to the wide range of blogging being done throughout the Baruch College community, but as a sort of digital commons where ideas and resources and teaching and learning can be shared within the community and beyond.  So I’ve tried to structure the new site in a way that makes it easy to share a lot of different kinds of information, and for visitors to peer in and get a sense of how folks are using this technology at Baruch.

The site includes:

A Home Page with featured blogs and links to recently updated and particularly active blogs on the system  At the bottom of the homepage, RSS feeds pull in posts from the CUNY News Wire, from the Baruch College Teaching Blog, from Cacophony, and from the Ticker.  I’m working on a links list that will be customized for particular pages within the site, and will be using this as a space to tinker, to play with, and to show off the functionality that the WordPress community is constantly building.  All of this is living, and will evolve.

An “About” page with a mission statement about this project :

Blogs@Baruch was built on the following core beliefs:

• College students should write regularly in all disciplines and in a variety of formats and genres
• Faculty should have available support for their efforts to create avenues for student communication
• Open-source technology has an important role to play in the future of higher education, and colleges will gain much from experimenting with a wide-range of open-source technology solutions
• Community users of centrally-administered software should share both the burden and excitement of innovating with technology.  While a strong support network is necessary, a do it yourself ethos should be prominent
• WordPress Multiuser is the most powerful and flexible blogging system available, and can be effectively customized to fulfill a wide range of the communicative needs of the college community

A “Projects” page where visitors can take a look at current and past blogs and sites supported by the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute.  About three dozen blogs are linked, though some are password protected. Student blogs– we’ve got about 140 going right now– are not linked from this page.

A Blog where we’ll draw attention to specific things happening throughout the system and make announcement that might be of interest to our users.  This space will, over time, we hope, merge with what’s under the “Support” area, where I’m going to be adding to and refining what I hope are helpful materials– FAQs, a manual for WordPress customized for users of this system, suggestions for using weblogs in college teaching, instructional screencasts, and handouts for faculty to use and adapt.  The manual is in need of an overhaul, and this section will be tightened considerably in the coming weeks.

A “Contact” page for visitors to easily contact us.  Features a reCaptcha, for those curious.

Ultimately, we hope users and visitors will find this helpful, and will share in and contribute to the information it provides.  Scott Leslie recently wrote a powerhouse blog post on the ethics of and obstacles to sharing in higher education.  Leslie argues that institution-driven, overly-organized approaches to sharing tend to halt and stutter, while organic, individualized networks are more likely to thrive.  He posits lots of ideas about why and how this is, and concludes ultimately that planning to share gets in the way of actually doing it.  I take and sympathize with his point.

At the same time, I think the technology that eases sharing is still relatively underused and also undertheorized at Baruch and throughout CUNY.  One of our goals is to model just what a distributed learning environment is.  We’ll be using this new space to push, to compile, and to provide paths to useful information for our wildly diverse range of users.  It will ultimately be up to the users of the system to find value, and maybe to contribute some of their own.

The beauty is that they can do that just by getting a blog and sharing their work with the world.  If there’s value, and it’s put out there, it will be found.

In the interest of practicing what I preach– and since I totally relied on the fruits of the Google as I designed the new home for Blogs@Baruch– click beneath the fold for some techie detail on the redesign.  If the words “CSS,” “widgets,” “plugin,” “WordPress theme,” “hackalicious,” and “pwnd” mean nothing to you, no need to read on….

• This new site is based on the Thematic WordPress Theme Framework, which offers 13 different widgetized areas, and the ability to develop child themes using CSS that will allow you to maintain your customized style through theme upgrades.  I should have probably created a child style, but I didn’t figure out how to do so until I was already deep into hacking away at the some of the php and css files.  This might come back to bite me later on, but I’m rather sanguine at this point that I can dig myself out of holes I’ve dug myself into.
• Customization, made possible by a secured version of the Userthemes Management plugin: in the Thematic file structure, I’ve hacked the following files:
  • Sidebar.php: added search and login code
  • Header.php: added click to get home, hacked out the branding code, and tweaked the menu
  • Footer.php: added “Baruch is CUNY” logo, and moved site info down a div tag
  • Library/extensions/hooks-filters.php: added code to make “home” button appear in menu
  • Library/styles/default.css, I hacked to bits; I also an images folder to hold the footer and header images.. the header image is from the Baruch College Visual Standards library of images
  • I made a couple of changes to Library/layouts/2-c-r-fixed.css, which controls spacing of the different areas of the blog
  • I created two Page templates for displaying mediawiki pulls and screencasts without interference from sidebars
• Active plugins:
  • Dagon Design Mailer for the contact page, with reCaptcha active
  • Flickr Badge Widget, to show those Baruch photos on the front
  • Widget Logic, to control what widgets appear on what pages
  • Wiki Inc, to link to the wiki where our manual lives
    • I had some problem with the Wiki Inc plugin, so much of the support section is actually written directly into WordPress, save the FAQs and the screencasts.  For some reason, I can’t get images to pull.  Brian Lamb and Scott McMillan from the University of British Columbia, who work in the group that produced the plugin, generously gave me some of their time, but we couldn’t get it going.  I’ll return to that, because it’s a kick-ass function.

That’s all for my anatomy of a hack.  So easy, even a historian can do it.  If you have any ideas for additional enhancements, please share them.

As we all recover from the remarkable events of the past hours, days, and weeks, and begin to look forward at what a President Barack Hussein Obama might mean for the United States and the world, I find the appropriate tone elusive.  My faith in Obama as a leader is buoyed by the following: amidst the pervasive bloviating about the historical nature of this election, with the pundits and commentators falling all over themselves to proclaim a post-racial America, to muse about the Black Camelot, to argue that the election of someone they as recently as yesterday proclaimed a “socialist” means that this is in-fact a “center-right nation,” the President-elect himself spoke of his election in terms at once commensurate to the moment and clear-eyed about what awaits.

When Obama took the stage last night, I was struck immediately by just how somber he looked.  He seemed both humbled by the moment and completely cognizant of the utter mess he’s set to inherit.  In the most soaring section of his speech, he cast the history of the past century through the eyes of Ann Nixon Cooper, born in Georgia in 1902 to a former slave.  He recounted the greatest American achievements of the last 100 years — women’s suffrage, the New Deal, World War II, the Black Freedom Movement, the moon landing, the fall of the Iron Curtain — interspersing, in the rhythm of the black church, the phrase “yes, we can” to connote that when Americans have faced existential challenges, the majority of them have repeatedly congealed around a shared, fundamental belief in the nation.  He then pivoted to the future, imagining his daughters looking back upon the 21st century, pitching this moment as the one where we chose to give them a history about which they could be proud.  This segment effectively situated the election in our national story and comfortably acknowledged its implications for the history of racism in this country, without letting the idea overwhelm the whole.  It was an “omni-American” moment, drawing upon the pain and richness in our national experience to present an integrative vision of history.

Yet, his sober body language cut somehow against this profound statement of hope, and did so in a way that actually gave me more confidence in his ability to become the greatest president in more than a generation.  This is a politician who is keenly self-aware, who said in May 2007, while reflecting upon his trouble in the earliest debates, “there’s a certain ambivalence in my character that I like about myself. It’s part of what makes me a good writer, you know? It’s not necessarily useful in a presidential campaign.”  In an 180-degree turn from the current occupant of the White House, here is a man who struggles with ideas, who challenges himself to synthesize, who speaks to Americans as adults who can be trusted to see more than two diametrically opposed sides to an issue.  This is the temperament that allowed Obama to surge against the backdrop of an economic crisis, to soar above Rovian politics; it’s the persona that injected humility into his presentation last night, that led him to address in sympathetic terms those who disagree with him; and it’s the proper tone to lead the nation as it begins to face this next wave of existential challenges.

This man can’t solve all of our problems, doesn’t portend the end of race, and is bound by difficult choices.  But I can think of no better leader for this moment.

Some additional, random thoughts:

• Delano. S. Fitzgerald. Baines. Herbert Walker. Hussein.
• For the first time in my life, we have a President who may be able to convince some people that government is not the biggest problem in their lives.
• It will be fascinating to watch the Republican Party as it struggles to pick up the pieces and to find a voice.  It will be at war with itself.
• Obama will be the first president my and many of your kids will remember throughout their lives.
• It’s almost as remarkable for a former community organizer to win this office as it is an African-American.
• The passage of Proposition 8 in California should lessen the joy progressives take forward from yesterday.