The most compelling features of BuddyPress are the ability for members to create their own groups, and to follow activity of their “friends” across multiple blogsites without having to literally follow them to the other sites. It’s like a hybrid of WordPress and Facebook.

I’ll be testing it out for the next little while. If it works out, we’ll probably keep running it here, at least as a “side” blog if not as the “main” blog site for the service…

It lets you add an image for each post to be automagically displayed on the front of the site. Cool? Unsure yet. Looks like a pretty manual process of adding the images, but that might not be too bad…

Nope. Magazeen apparently doesn’t grok WordPress Multiuser. Doh.

Ferinstance, here’s (hopefully) a live display of posts from my main blog:

• Priority Inbox without GMail
• Notes: Vannevar Bush: As We May Think
• Unlimited Magazine: The Wild World of Massively Open Online Courses
• William Gibson – Google’s Earth
• Bruce Schneier on privacy, security, control, and google

And my latest Flickr photos:

and del.icio.us bookmarks:

• Beginner Guitar Lessons :: morphis.com September 5, 2010
• printable guitar tablature chart September 5, 2010
• Extension:AccessControl - MediaWiki September 2, 2010
• Social Networks in Action - Learning Networks @ UOW September 2, 2010
• Back to school: What’s that university degree worth?, August 31 2010 August 31, 2010

Hmm… Looks really, really sweet. But the Flickr feed failed for some reason…

If you click that, you’ll be presented with a utility to select photos from your Flickr account:

You can search your own photos, or photos posted by other Flickr users. Once you select a photo, you can define the size and placement of the image using the controls provided:

and once selected, the Flickr photo is embedded in a post, like this:

Before using it, you’ll have to authorize UCalgaryBlogs.ca to allow access to your Flickr account – it’s safe, and the plugin walks you through it in the Settings section of the WordPress Admin interface.

Just click the “Flickr authenticate” button, and a new browser window will open, where Flickr.com will ask if you authorize this connection between your blog and Flickr account. You can revoke this at any time, and it won’t add or edit anything on Flickr. If you approve this, just follow the instructions on that page, and close that browser window (or tab) when finished.

Then, just click the “Finish authenticate” button, so your blog will store your Flickr account ID.

To select the language to use while administering a blog, go to the admin page, and hit “Settings” – scroll down that page to the bottom, and you’ll see this language selector:

Languages available for the WordPress administration interface

For now, I’ve only added a handful of languages, but if I’ve missed a language that you want to use, please let me know and I’ll add it ASAP.

It’s not perfect, and not every bit of text is displayed in the selected language, but it is much better than a non-localizable admin interface. Here’s what the admin interface of my blog looks like with Chinese selected:

My blog's admin interface with Chinese selected as the active language.

Of course, the actual content has to be written in whatever language you need, and this won’t do any translation, but it should help by providing the administrative interface in various languages.

And since we’re at a point now where the exact technology chosen really Does Not Matter Anymore (you can get pretty much any web software to do pretty much anything with proper prodding and understanding – and they pretty much all now properly grok RSS and tags, so it’s easy to reuse and republish what you get out there in multiple other formats and locations), it’s good to keep an open mind. Especially when getting ready to start rolling out a campus blogging system based on WPMU…

For example, I used dlnorman.ucalgaryblogs.ca as the blog address, and gave it my login info. It will work with multiple blogs, too – but each blog needs to be configured separately.

I’ll do some more testing, but this is looking stable enough to start rolling out. I may need to put together a UCalgary theme, though…

How ’bout image uploading?