I am working on a new blog, to be announced soon. If I have learned anything from this blog (which will continue, but return back to the real core purpose of promoting free and/or open source software in k12 education) it’s that folks are out to get me.

By that I mean trackback/comment/comment form spammers. It’s been unreal! I can’t imagine what a real ed blogger that’s halfway decent in the rankings deals with. According to technorati, I don’t even make it into the top 100,000. Can’t say I’m terribly concerned, although I suppose it would be an ego boost if it happened. Maybe the new blog will be the trick! I’ll be announcing that shortly, once I finish getting the theme just right, the plugins installed, and some other fine tuning done. I think it will be good.

I want to ask a question before I continue, though. What do you think are absolutely mission critical WordPress plugins? Here is a list of the plugins I either use or have modified for use. Do you have any that you think I should add to the list? For what it’s worth, I am using the newest version (2.0.5) of WordPress and all these plugins seem to work fine.

• Akismet – Spam Protection – installed by default with WordPress.
• Ultimate Tag Warrior – Helps me tag my posts with ease.
  
• PodPress – It’s the gold standard for WordPress and podcasting. Works wonderfully and recent improvements have knocked out some of the bugs that caused me lots of grief in months past.
• Feedburner Feed Replacement Plugin – theoretically redirects all feed traffic to feedburner.
• EdBlogger News Submit Link – Automatically adds a submit link for EdBlogger News. I actually modified this one from a plugin called Sol-Digg , by Bas Wenneker, which I don’t think is bring developed any more. So I say I did it! Jokingly more than anything, I give credit where credit is due. You can see this in action below each post.
• EduBlogoSphere Submit Plugin – I modified the above one to work for a new service, located at EduBlogosphere.com. In the interest of full disclosure, I sort of run the edublogosphere.com domain using an open source piece of software called pligg. I am thinking it would be a cool way to unite the edblogger community, but not sure I would ever get buy-in and enough traffic. So it sits there.
• Google Analytics – Helps me see the underworkings of my site’s traffic. Haven’t fully harnessed this one yet.
• Spam Karma 2 – This helps where Akismet does not, for trackback validation. I was getting LOADS of trackback spam until SK2 took control. I doubt I need both Akismet and SK2 but they don’t seem to be fighting each other.
• WordPress Database Backup – This is also a default plugin, but a good one.
• WP Contact Form – I use this so that folks can contact me without me revealing my email address, a defense against spam, naturally. Although, I am finding out that LOTS of bots seem to be able to use this form, so now I am getting a bunch of contact form spam. I think I need a new contact form option with some sort of image validation-type check to it. Going to be looking into a new solution for this one…
• XD Forum – I wanted this more to learn how to do it than anything else. I have figured out a blog is not a great spot for discussion outside of the comments realm. My forum never got going, and was originally a bit hard to read. I fiddled with bbpress when it was first released a few weeks ago, and never could quite get it to work with my theme wrapped around it. It works nicely alone, and can integrate with WP logins, etc, but I had trouble truly integrating it, and my sites are fractured enough as it is.
• BlogLiner – I don’t use this on this blog, although I should. My blogroll is sadly out of date. BlogLiner spits my Bloglines blogroll into a fancy little sidebar widget. I had to trim the list, since there are a good many feeds in my account. I made the majority private and left the ones I think would be the most useful.

I think all of these are available on the newly redesigned WP-Plugins.net site, which I think can be a fun site to explore.

So that is the list compiled from my own surfing. I decided that if I was to find a more comprehensive list I might need to look to the blogging community, writ large. Via Bloggingpro I came across this article from John C Chow. After reading his list, I decided to add two to my list, and have installed them since beginning the draft of this post. They are:

• Digg Click - I previously used Cybernet’s Digg Button plugin but found that I had to turn off the Visual Editor each and every time I intended to include a Digg Button. Digg Click, as you can see from my implementation, has a nice feature of not requiring a post to have been previously “dugg” before it displays the button.
• Related Posts – This plugin is obvious. It seems to work based on the title of the post, and has a feature where you can add keywords (not tags) to help the plugin better match what it calls related to the current post. You can see that it works, although not terribly well. That is a fault of my desire to create witty titles that sometimes are a bit non-sequitor to the post content. Do I need to shape up? Well…maybe.

So that’s my list. Did I miss something? If you comment, please make sure to provide a link to your favorite plugin! I will be announcing my new blog soon, to much fanfare I am sure! Thanks for standing by me.

I am about to go nuts. I have spent almost all day investigating different wiki options for my class. Here are the details of my journey in the hopes that it may help you in yours.

A few days ago I got a pretty good idea for a collaborative learning “project”. My kids watched a video about a young lady who lives on the shores of the Amazon River in Peru. We watched what life is like there and compared it to life here. Since I have been to Peru more than once to live, I could relate my own ideas. So here is the idea…when the video ended, I asked if my kids would like to meet “Elida” the subject of the documentary. They of course were excited about the idea. I strung them along for a bit and then dropped the bomb that Elida can’t come into the United States at will. She would be rejected without special permission (read: a visa). Bearing in mind my kids are 11 years old (mean age) they were particularly shocked.

This led us into a stimulating discussion about immigration. We began with the question, “Should the United States let people in”, just for the asking. Well the reason I am posting this here is I have been investigating ways to collaborate. I divided my class (rather, they divided themselves) into two sides, the Pros and the Cons. Some did not necessarily agree with their chosen side, but wanted to explore the reasoning behind it. So, how do I make this open source and web 2.0 tasty?

Here are my wiki-based thoughts…

1. Since I know teachers in Peru, I could easily have my kids post to a Wiki and then have the professors and students comment to it.

2. I could have other teachers from other classes around the world, from San Fernando, CA (maybe Marco Torres ?) to Shanghai (Jeff, you listening?) have their students read and comment.

It’s also worth noting that I pay for web hosting so I have lots of space, gobs of bandwidth, and enough MySQL databases to keep me going for some time. So I am not limited to a free or ad-supported wiki.

Since I have six classes with roughly 25 students in each class, and since they are divided into groups of typically four, I wanted a wiki with a quality drill-down menu and easy commenting, so that people reading my kids’ work would be encouraged to leave their two cents without frustration. Ease of commenting is crucial to a truly collaborative project.

So that ultimately led me to a Wiki search. I was over at EdTechTalk Sunday night and listened into the first half of the broadcast. I will catch the rest via podcast. They were interviewing the co-founder and VP of Marketing of PbWiki. So Monday morning I fired up Flock and went to work trying to find a wiki suitable for young minds not accostumed to this type of learning.

I began with Mediawiki, made famous by Wikipedia, of course. I found it to be feature-rich and enjoyed its full range of extensions. The trouble is simply that it requires too much knowledge of WikiText, and my kids are doing well if they can handle even basic WYSIWYG commands! Wikimedia is full and robust, but not a great choice for the type of Wiki I want for my class. I am aware that it is possible to integrate FCKEditor into Mediawiki, and I have done so for some of my other Content Management System installs, but the security risks were too much for me to handle. I need an easy solution for my kids.

As I mentioned a moment ago, I listened to Ramit talk about some of the neat features of Pbwiki. I like the concept and it certainly was easy to sign up. I know they have some features that are in the batter’s box to be rolled out, and I’d like to know what they are. I was a little taken aback when I got an email offering me a big savings if I upgrade. One of the things I like about Wikispaces is that while I know there are premium upgrades, they seem to be totally fine with me staying at my level of comfortable freeness. I felt a little strange getting a sales ad in my email inbox so shortly after signing up for a free service. Ok, have to pay the bills, so I won’t hold it against them. What ruled Pbwiki out for me is of course, the lack of a good WYSIWYG editor based on a non-Wikitext format. My kids have such a short time left that there is no time for a learning curve. I know they can figure it out, but at what cost?

So I moved on to Jotspot. I have had a Jotspot account for some time, but not really used it based on the severe limitations given to the free account. At least until recently. Thanks to Miguel Guhlin and two posts, I went back to Jotspot to give it another shot. I loved the Spreadsheet integration, although it is not anything I can really use right now. Again, I found it to be a little tough to use (from an 11 year old standpoint) given the lack of a quality WYSIWYG editor integrated. I just know my kids would get confused by exclamation points and the like. Remember, these students leave me on October 20, so that cancels the teach-them-and-it-will-be-ok argument. I have 9 classes left with them, I need a turnkey solution.

So my next idea was to investigate Wikispaces. I am sort of a big fan of the Technospud blog and she seems to have a special place in her heart for Wikispaces, so I gave them a shot. I especially like that they are giving away 10,000 free wikis to educators. So I went and signed up. I like the Wikispaces idea, it was a really clean environment and I like the natural feel of the WYSIWYG editor for my kids. I think it would seem native to them and reduce the learning curve. I would prefer a little more ability to categorize the pages, but I can deal without it. So far, Wikispaces is my front runner, and I love that there are no ads. That’s a big deal.

I decided to investigate a little more into the world of installed, database backed-up Wikis thinking that since I have hosting, I may be at an advantage. So I headed over to my favorite Open Source Content Management System (and Learning Management System) playground, Opensourcecms.com. There I found a good list of different wikis that are installable and fun. The nice thing about Opensourcecms is that you can log in to their demo installations that are refreshed every few hours. So I was able to see how all of these different wikis function without having to install them on my own server first. There are also a number of different LMS’s, such as Moodle, Site @ School, and ATutor, not to mention others. If you’ve ever wondered what a fresh install of any of these pieces of software looks like, go play!

My travels to Opensourcecms.com turned me on to Dokuwiki. As noted by the name, Dokuwiki is mainly aimed at developers and small companies trying to create documentation on something, such as a project of piece of equipment. Nonetheless I decided to try it since it stores information in simple text files and requires no database. This means that installation is a simple matter of FTP’ing the directories to my web space and running it. I liked that a lot because there is zero risk of SQL Injection hacks or other security worries. Inherently, one can’t build a large Wiki this way, but no bother since I am going to refresh it each nine weeks. This solution would also keep me from having to manually run the MySQL queries using phpMyAdmin to empty the Wiki tables each time (a potential problem using Mediawiki if there were residual entries in the tables, albeit a low risk). Additionally, upgrading would be a breeze since one would only have to copy new files into the directory and not replace the text files from which the information is called. Troublingly, there was very little in the way of access control (outside of the standard .htaccess) and no commenting ability built it. There is a plugin manager, but I quickly hit roadblock after roadblock that I could not justify overcoming with Wikispaces luring me back with a siren’s call. So Dokuwiki went out the window, although it remains installed to play with later should the desire return.

So following my Dokuwiki disappointment I turned to a resource I found in a quick Google search; Wiki Matrix. I was thrilled with the Wiki Choice Wizard, which allows you to answer a few simple questions and helps you determine what you need given your criteria. I spent a good half hour trying to figure out which Wikis went with which options. I have been wanting to learn Ruby on Rails (or either by itself) but found nothing that fit my needs. Ultimaltely, I figured out that these wikis were more designed for the coporate world than the educational world (there’s a shock) and I found no software that could defeat the strong push for Wikispaces. So as of the afternoon, it was still looking strong for Wikispaces.
I came across another turnkey site called Netcipia, which I have to admit lured in me strongly based on a fun, clean home page. I liked the “web 2.0 participation” spin they put on it so I signed up. Immediately, I was disappointed. Once I actually got into my site, I found a standard Drupal-esque interface not terribly different from any other php-based CMS. Netcipia disappointed like no other in my search. They lured with strong words, even offering to let me download their software (see bottom under cancellation), but providing no link. I find no reason to stick with Netcipia when I already have various CMS’s installed, such as phpNuke and Drupal. So bye bye, Netcipia.

I thought back to the first time I had ever used a real, live Wiki. It was during the Discovery Educator Network’s planning stages for their National Leadership Conference. They purchased some space on Editme. I liked their interface because it was clean (a recurring theme, you’ll notice) and offered a simple WYSIWYG editor and easy discussion opportunities. The obvious drawback, $4.95 per month. As thrifty as I can tend to be, spending nearly $60 per year for my kids was a bit much. Truth be told, it’s my salary and four of us, so you can imagine the budget is tight. I love my students, but I love my family more. So editme went by the wayside because I can’t afford it.

So I was back to square one. Wiser yet frustrated. I felt like there should be a better solution. I went back to Miguel Guhlin’s post concerning Wetpaint and decided to give it a shot. I was immediately captivated by the site, and how fun it looked. I signed up for an account and have been mesmerized ever since. You naturally know what my one issue is, right? While they have a great WYSIWYG editor, I am scared of the ads! Google’s AdWords works contextually, and if my kids begin wiki’ing about a certain topic like Immigration, who knows what ads will pop up. I have to be super careful about what I allow in my kids eyes and ears, especially at the tender age of 11 (some are 10!). There is no way to limit the ads, no way to turn on the ad-equivalent of Strict-Safesearch so I think Wetpaint is not going to work. This really hurts, because this has been my favorite so far. One trick I really like is that I can upload a graphic to replace the text banner. Simple stuff, really, but it got my geek attention going.

Bottom line is that I am going to focus on Wikispaces for now. The nice thing about having students for a mere nine weeks is that I can try something new each nine weeks. So if Wikispaces turns sour (and with this much time and effort researching this, how could it?!) I can move to a different solution in a short time.

Do you have a Wiki story you want to tell? Did my analysis seem biased? Did I miss something? Am I just flat wrong? Tell me! Thanks for getting this far with me!!