I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the future of WPBook, and wanted to give a quick update. There are two key factors making me rethink the whole approach.
Pittsfield in the Near Future (from Cameo Wood on flickr, cc-by-nc license)
The first is a change Facebook has made, requiring SSL certificates for “all Canvas and Page tab applications.” (They announced this change earlier this summer, as part of the bizarrely Orwellian “Operation Developer Love” but it went into effect as of October 1st).
This is a problem because many WPBook users’ blogs are not available via https connections (including my own), and with this new Facebook change their WPBook implementation will fail, though how exactly that will be manifest isn’t clear to me yet (see below). Getting an SSL certificate for your blog isn’t an insurmountable task, but if you run your blog on cheap shared hosting, the costs of an SSL certificate (and the dedicated IP it requires) can be nearly as much as you’re paying for hosting! It’s also a task that the non-technical user will find horribly confusing.
Cathy Davidson, whose new book Now You See It I wrote about last week, was also a guest speaker at the Berkman Center. (Coincidentally, on the same day!).
Made it in Saturday for the opening of Podcamp Boston 6. (After a few working weekends in a row, I couldn’t do two full days so I just came in for Saturday morning).
While I was only able to catch three sessions, each would have been worth the trip on it’s own. All three were led by dynamic, engaging, even charismatic presenters who clearly know their stuff and know the Podcamp audience. Read more…
In support of our higher education practice, ISITE Design sponsored a panel at FutureM titled “Beyond the University Website: The Future of Digital Marketing in Higher Education.” Jeff Cram moderated, and participants included (from left to right in the photo):
