The blog concept is continuing to spread in our system. I know two of our colleges are looking at setting up a MovableType environment for both faculty use as well as committee communication.
I am looking for examples of sites hosting more than ahandful of MT blog sites to identify any relevant issues for scaling. I have previously set up 28 accounts for a workshop and found that when all of the group tried to log in together, the system bogged down (it might be due to the PII Linux host we are sitting on now).
But more importantlly, I really wish there were some better tools for managing/creating multiple accounts. It was downtight tedious to mind numbing to manually create all the accounts and enter the info in about 6 different screens.
So if anyone is hosting say 15 or more MT blogs now, can you drop me an email with some suggestions from your experience?
Brian’s worked his way up to 16 blogs. I set up his server to use the Berkley database (not MySQL), so there may be some scaling issues there.
It’s running on a stinky fast Dual Processor XServe, though. That may help just a little…
It helps that most of the blogs are inactive… For the reason’s D’Arcy noted, I’m not too worried about the hardware, but already account management/support is becoming an issue, and as our pilot scales up to an actual project (I hope) it will obviously become overwhelming. I recall David Wiley blogged a request like this as well… maybe we should set up a an MT Multiple Blog Interest Group (or maybe we need to just keep posting on it).
I kept in mind David’s plea. I thought there was a plug-in to deal with this, but was wrong, it was on the wish-list for MT enhancements (the MT forums are a good place to bring this up, but I have not been there in a while.
I would not be surprised to see this addressed if not by MT by the other plug-in developers, but I would like to see more than some 50 line MT/mySQL tag type approaches.
I am trying to get in my reqauests for an Xserve. My blog platform is a pokey PII/Linux box
I’m dealing with the same thing – I set up 15 accounts for my students and, while given, the server is slow (It’s a desktop box turned server), we couldn’t get more than 2 students on at once. Not a good experience for the class.
Even worse was when I decided to go back and specify that the blogs ping a server so i could track who had posted recently, or when I had to go through each individual account to set them up with a group blog. Ugh.
Not sure exactly what you’re using the blogs for, or what features you need, but for a little over $100 a year, you can get a Pro TypePad account and set up an unlimited number of blogs. It takes about 30 seconds to create each blog. Your domain names would look something like this, where this (http://maricopa.typepad.com) is the main URL and each user/blog would get a separate subdirectory, like so: http://maricopa.typepad.com/blogname
And you can set it up, like MT, so that you have a super user with access to all blogs, and the individual users have access only to their blogs. I’m toying with using this model for our school, though the low cost of MT (ie:free) is always hard to beat. At the very least, you can try TypePad free for 30 days and check it out.
Good luck.
I run a multiple MT blogs domain at chattablogs.com
We have upwards of 95 blogs on there right now (other domains ’round 40 a piece), all of them on the same server, with a total of around 160, and it runs great, fine, no problems at all.