As a researcher interested in Digital Literacy and Personal Learning Environments I often am arguing that there is an increased trend for students and staff to break free of University systems and strike out on their own. After all, why struggle with your IT department to get a blog up and running, when Blogger will do it for free, and do it straight away?
And yet my own website has remained ‘based on machines kindly given and sometimes maintained’ by the University of Southampton. In fact its been there for sixteen years, which means in Web terms its almost Grade II listed. At the same time my Blog (less venerable, but still established in 2006) has been hosted on Blogger. This year it seemed right to consolidate the two, and establish a proper website for my work.
Why? Well for a start its all been a little neglected recently, and I’d like to turn over a bit of a new leaf this year. But also I’m increasingly involved in things away from the University, whether it be consultancy work, pet projects like BeatTheDiesel, or things closer to my heart, such as the Swindon Sands charity.
So here we are at a fresh new web address, and running a spanky new CMS.
I played with Joomla for a while, but discovered that its internal architecture is in fact the result of a major accident involving hundreds of people who have apparently never built a website before. WordPress is the more boring, but ultimately more fitting, CMS for my needs, and the one the site is now built with. Its design is a more sensible for this structure and more importantly its innards are just exposed enough for you to do a little fiddling, without having to learn a whole lot of new stuff (assuming you understand php, sql and css).
I’ve gone with a slightly modified version of the Spectacular theme by rockatee and I hope you like the result!
David Millard 