Mr. Potter’s IT world

Intresting article on the spike in internet traffic during the Obama inauguration.

 

 

Today, came the news that Barak Obama will get to keep his Blackberry. Or, more correctly a modified highly secure Blackberry made by General Dynamics, now referred to as the ObamaBerry. Score one for Barak, at least for keeping in touch with family and friends (no official communications allowed). Additionally, as the Whitehouse staff began to setup their offices today, they were surprised by the relatively ancient technology they found there: 6 yr old Windows PCs, non-functioning phone lines, a couple of laptops, and no email accounts! The Macintosh & web 2.0 savvy staffers who during the campaign so artfully utilized facebook, youtube, twitter, and other social networking to spread the message were at a loss to even place closed captioning on a video clip for the website.

The staffers quickly setup their own gmail accounts, only to be told that no outside email accounts will be allowed. It remains to be seen if the Whitehouse staffers will get to retain the use of some of their social media, but already the new Whitehouse website sports a new web2.0 look. There is already a framework in place for the publishing of:

• executive orders
• In-depth descriptions of the administration’s agenda
• the Whitehouse weblog (no commenting allowed however)
• the weekly Obama video addresses
• slideshows, and other interactive and participatory content.

 

An amazing collection of inauguration photos from around the world. Its amazing and humbling to think that the rest of the world finds the installment of a new American president in such high fascination if not high regard.

With the startup of the Wordpress blogging software, I have installed 50+ themes which users may utilize for their sites. You can try out and with one click install the theme of your choice by going to the ‘Design’ tab in your dashboard.

Most of the themes may be used as is. However, a few are designed to be utilized with certain plugins, or may need some images installed. Feel free to try out a few designs. Once you have installed a theme, you may view the result by clicking on “Visit Site” at the top of your dashboard.

If you would like to use a different theme that you may have found on the internet, let me know and I will install it on the server.

I think I can safely state that the Wordpress blogging engine (running this and other faculty blogs) is now comfortably on-line. Next on my agenda is to create an instructional video on the basics of Wordpress. 

Stay Tuned.