After a few months away from blogging, I’m taking it up again. Here’s a rundown of what I’ve been doing the last few months:

ScholarPress

CHNM News and Dave have already pointed this out: Dave and I have started ScholarPress, a suite of WordPress plugins with academics in mind. We have two already out in the world, being downloaded as we speak, and a few more in the works.

The first plugin is Dave’s WPBook plugin, which acts as a bridge between a WordPress blog and a Facebook application. I’ve used the plugin to put my course information, pulled directly from my course website, in an application on Facebook that students can add to their profiles. Just another way to make course information available to students.

The second plugin, Courseware, was originally created by me and Josh Greenberg over the summer of 2006. I’ve used it for all of the classes I’ve taught so far. It gives you the ability to manage a syllabus, bibliography, and assignments through a WordPress blog. I’ve always set up a WordPress blog for my course site, and used Courseware to publish class assignments and meetings. The schedule page includes a link to subscribe to the schedule in a calendar application; it parses events marked up with microformats and creates a vCal file.

A few other plugins in the works:

• Gradebook—a plugin that works with Courseware to give instructors the ability to store and share grades securely with students.
• Bibliographer—I’m considering making the bibliography portion of the Courseware plugin separate, and beefing it up to do multiple reading lists, reviews, ratings, etc. Of course, it would work with Courseware.
• Footnoter—Would give post writers the ability to easily and quickly add footnotes to blog posts through the WYSIWYG editor of WordPress, and have the footnotes appear when hovering over the superscripted note.
• Highlighter—This plugin would allow readers to select a portion of a blog post or page and associate a comment with that selection.

Omeka

The biggest project I’ve been working on at CHNM for the past few months is Omeka. Put simply, Omeka is a simple platform to allow cultural institutions (museums, historical societies, libraries), or pretty much anyone, to manage and publish items, collections, and exhibits on the Web. We’ve used earlier versions of Omeka to power the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank and Object of History, and we’re using the latest releases of Omeka to run a few projects currently under development, like Gulag: Many Days, Many Lives, which is set to launch at the end of November.

If you’re interested in getting on the list of beta testers before the public release (which is early March), visit Omeka’s website for more information.