Now that Tim and I have successfully built a site at community.umwdomains.com that aggregates the activity of the project, I’ve been focussing my efforts recently on what we can do to visualize and expose that activity. Every site that is created (as long as it uses Installatron to install a Web application) on the server as well as much of the content on those sites (as long as the content is available via RSS feed) is being pulled into the WordPress install that runs Community. That means currently we have information about 800 sites and almost 3000 pieces of content from those sites. For sites, we ask users to self-report the course they’re building it for as well as their “status” (student, faculty, staff). From the course data, we’re able to glean instructor and department. We’re also tagging sites with semester information. Content from these sites is similarly tagged with course, instructor, department, and semester information.

That’s a lot of content to play with, and it’s been fun to develop tools to allow users to explore all of the information.  Continue reading Visualizing & Exposing Domain of One’s Own Activity →