About

Like many of you out there at different institutions of higher learning, I was thrown into WordPress with little knowledge about it. It was mandated that I use WordPress for all our faculty blogs. So I had to investigate where to host it. Even though I had 15 years of software development experience I had not been taught about hosting options much. I had to choose either wordpress.com, self-hosted WordPress or WordPress MU at my school. I learned quickly that because our school could not agree to some of the terms and conditions at different external hosting sites we needed to host on-site. Because of that I had to learn a decent amount about unix and php to install it. After getting it installed there was an equal amount to learn about managing users, plugins and themes. I even ended up creating a service level agreement for my users. The site was sometimes inundated with attacks from bots around the globe. This led me to investigate more about how to run security scans and load tests on the application on a regular basis. With the success of the blogs more sites were asked to be run on WordPress… and the story starts over.

As I attended word-camps and found other people from different institutions of higher learning I decided to try to host a one day virtual conference for those of you out there who use WordPress in higher education. The cost is $44 for the day. I think that you will find the value. I wish I had something like this when I got started.

5% of the proceeds go to kiva.org