Omeka, another fine product produced by CHNM, has released the public beta. This is a great tool for museums and other places (or individuals) who want to create online exhibits.

In other news, there is now a growing movement to archive old skills that are no longer used. Mr. Scoble started a list of obsolete skills on his blog and later made a wiki about it. Now everybody can contribute their obsolete skills. Not only is this a humorous way to look at the evolving world of technology, but it provides a useful archive for anyone who might run across the need to use one of these obsolete skills.

Check out THAT podcast (THAT = The Humanities And Technology). It’s a new video pod cast put on by a couple of co-workers at CHNM. They interview someone in the technical field about software that helps those of us in the humanities.

The first episode includes an interview with Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress (the software running this site!) and shows you how to install and configure ScholarPress (a plug-in to WordPress written by Jeremy Boggs).

It’s great stuff, check it out!

The Center for History and New Media has been profoundly solemn the past week. Our founder and director, Roy Rosenzweig, passed away last week.

More about Roy can be read at his memorial site: thanksroy.org.

What’s with these multiple posts in a day…

Today marks the completion of my Multiple WordPress Updater Script. I’ve already posted a bunch about school stuff, might as well post about work stuff too.

We host over 55 blogs at CHNM. It’s up to me to update them when security patches or new versions come out. Doing them each by hand is a pain. I did a bit of searching but didn’t find anything that would help me update so many sites automatically. So I wrote a bash script that will do it for me. It reads a file that lists all of the wordpress install paths or prompts you for the path to one, prompts for the version to switch to, and a mysql user/pass that has permissions for all databases.

Then the script creates a copy of the database, makes a copy of the wp-content folder, updates the wordpress install using subversion, fixes some permissions, and saves the subversion output to a file in your home directory (which I’ll probably change to somewhere’s else).

I run this via sudo as root for easy updating. What I’m really pleased with is that I figured out how to get the script to pull the database name from the wp-config.php file, and grab the owner and group for later fixing of the permissions.

I hope it can be useful to someone. If you have any comments or suggestions, let me know.

Latest Version: 1.2.3 – 04/29/08
Download file

UPDATE 24.4.08: WordPress Updater has been updated. I also updated this post, took out the code in the post, and put up a link to the file for you to download instead.