Unix Systems Group

As part of USF’s on-going efforts against copyright infringement, the University has signed an agreement with Ruckus, a digital entertainment network designed to provide students, faculty, and staff with a legal, safe, and community-based way to explore and share music and movies. For more information on how to use this service, please click on the link below or go to http://www.ruckus.com .

Signing up is simple: all you need is a USF email address.

blog.usf.edu and myweb.usf.edu will be unavailable during the Blackboard maintenance window (12AM-2AM) on Aug 4, 2006. This outage is necessary to accomodate changes needed for the upcoming Blackboard upgrade. No other services (WebMail, mail.usf.edu accounts, etc) will be affected. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

The campus chilled water supply will be interrupted for 24 hours starting on December 22 at 3:45PM. The air conditioners at USF use chilled water for cooling, so this means that all A/C will be off-line until chilled water is restored. The Blackboard servers will be down during this period. (details here), but we will attempt to keep all other student services provided by Academic Computing (Email, webpages, blogs) running during the outage. These services will also be shut down if they are in danger of over-heating.

We’ve been having some hardware problems with the storage array that holds all student home directories. No data has been affected, but myweb/blog@USF has been brought down several times over the last two days to fix the problem. I believe the issues have been resolved, so we shouldn’t have any more outages. However, this is related to the problem which the MyUSF group is working on, so we may need to bring the system down for short periods over the next few hours to help resolve the hardware issues they are seeing.

Your department or organization can now have their own blog@USF blog! Blog@USF provides your group with the latest web technologies and allows you to quickly and easily build a useful and informative website.

Features

• All of the features of a blog@USF blog
• Multiple blog users — all of your staff/members can post their own content
• Increased storage space — 300MB+

What can we do with a group blog?

• Post details on your department’s latest research
• Promote your group to the USF community and beyond
• Share pictures of your organization’s events
• Publish a RSS feed of the latest news from your group

• Much, much more!

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blog@USF and myweb.usf.edu have been moved from a Sun Enterprise 220R to a dual-Xeon box running RHEL 4. This should improve performance considerably. If you have any C code in your myweb.usf.edu account, it will need to be recompiled for Linux. PHP and PERL code should work without any modifications. If you have any problems with the new setup, please post a comment or email us at usg@mailman.acomp.usf.edu.

Structured Blogging allows you to make your blog entries look differently based on their content. If you review a movie (or a book, CD, performance, etc) on your blog, you can use a standard format which gives the reader more information about the item you are reviewing and presents it in an attractive way. For examples of Structured Blogging content, vist the Structured Blogging website.

To demonstrate how Structured Blogging works, we’ll go through the steps of writing a movie review.

1. Login to your blog and go to the Write page.
2. Click on “Write Review Post”
3. The following fields are required:
   • Review Title — Title to be used for the blog post
   • Product Name — Title of the movie/book/CD that is being reviewed
   • Rating — On a scale from 1 to 5, what would you rate this movie/book/CD/whatever ?
4. When reviewing Movies, books, CDs, or DVDs, details and a cover image can be added automatically. Click on lookup to begin the search.
5. Add the review to a category — I suggest adding a Reviews category to keep your reviews in.
6. Once you write the review and save the post, the review will be posted on your blog. You can see the example post here

A tag is a keyword or phrase which describes a blog post. By themselves, they’re not that impressive but combine them with some public web-services, and it can be a valuable addition to blogging. For instance, a blog posting about a USF football game might have the tags/keywords football USF “Big East”. OK, so what’s the use of that? Well, check out Technorati. Click on any of topics and you’ll see posts from around the world. You can find a blog or website on just about any topic you can think of on Technorati. In addition to websites, you can also find pictures (from Flickr) and links (from Del.icio.us) related to the topic.

Back to our USF football game example, let’s say after the game, I submit my post and head over to Technorati to check out the latest news about USF. In addition to my post about the game, two other people have also posted entries about it, pictures of the game are available on Flickr, and a link to ESPN.com’s coverage is available from del.icio.us. All of this in just a few minutes since the game finished.

How do I use them?

That’s easy. Whenever you write a new post, take a look at the text-box just below the “Publish” and “Save” buttons. It’s marked KeyWords. Type in all the tags that you want to use, separated by spaces — if you want to use a multi-word tag, surround it with quotes. That’s it! When you publish you’re post, Technorati will be notified and your post should show up on their pages within seconds.