ITS is pleased to announce the launch of the University Blog Service, located at sites.utexas.edu. Faculty and staff will be able to create and edit blogs for individuals, departments, or other university groups at no cost to them.

The University Blog Service offers a number of features:

• URLs that are under the utexas.edu domain
• The ability to set blogs as publicly viewable, or privately viewable to a specified group of users
• Customization with one of 40 available themes
• The ability to track blog traffic through statistics

Faculty and staff can automatically create a blog from the University Blog Service page by logging in with their UT EID username and password. Departments, groups, teams, and workgroups can submit a request to have a blog created for them.

Faculty should be aware that the service does not meet the FERPA requirements for hosting Category-I data, and therefore the University Blog Service should not be used for academic purposes. Faculty who want to use blogs in the classroom should consider Blackboard 9, which launched on May 26 and is FERPA compliant.

The University Blog Service has been successful in a limited pilot program for the past six months, with over 200 new blogs created by a variety of university groups and individuals. The service uses WordPress MU, a multi-user version of the WordPress blogging platform.

If you encounter any difficulties with the University Blog Service, please contact the ITS Help Desk at (512) 475-9400.

Welcome to sites.utexas.edu. This is the first step in establishing an enterprise blog service for the University of Texas at Austin. During this initial phase, Fall 2008, we are limiting participation to select staff and departments for the purpose of appropriately scaling the hardware and tuning the software for wider campus adoption.

Want a few more details? Check out the Blogs and Wikis Project Description and don’t hesitate to let us know if you have any questions.