Blogs.rice.edu has been upgraded to WordPress 3.3.1.  The old Facebook Recommend Widget, rarely used, finally became incompatible with our installation, so it has been discontinued.  If you’d like Facebook/Google/Twitter icons on your site, enable the social widgets plugin on your Plugins menu.

If you observe any problems following the upgrade, please send a note to webservices@rice.edu.

Blogs.rice.edu will be down for maintenance for about an hour beginning at 1:oo AM on Feb. 11 (i.e. late Friday night / early Saturday morning).

Rice-branded versions of WordPress’s Twentyten and Twentyeleven themes are now available.  Check out the themes listing and select “Rice 2010″ or “Rice 2011.”  Please let us know if you discover any issues with these new themes.

Blogs.rice.edu has been upgraded to WordPress 3.2.1.  Please notify webservices@rice.edu if you observe any problems relating to the upgrade.

The new version offers a new theme: Twentyeleven.  Web Services recommends it for new sites that do not need one of the “Rice” themes.  See also Twentyten, Coraline, and Delicate.

• New custom banner images that fit the default Rice theme are now available at http://www.rice.edu/template
• New themes are available: Coraline, Delicate, Twentyten, and P2.  Twentyten has been up for six months, but it’s underutilized.
• P2 is a sort of “wall” / Twitter clone.  Feel free to use http://wall.rice.edu for announcements, etc.–or start your own.
• All public sites that allow search engines in their privacy settings now generate XML sitemaps to improve SEO and lessen load on the server.  Visit http://yoursitename.blogs.rice.edu/robots.txt and http://yoursitename.blogs.rice.edu/sitemap.xml to see this in action.
• Site owners can visit Settings > Fb Recommend to configure Open Graph descriptions of their sites for better dissemination through Facebook.  A Facebook “Recommend” widget is also available under Themes > Widgets.  Note that if you use any widget, your entire sidebar must be built with widgets.

Please email webservices@rice.edu with any questions.

The default “Rice University Ultra Nice” theme for sites on blogs.rice.edu now supports custom header images.  Visit Appearance > Header on your dashboard to change the header image for your site.  If your image is not exactly 940 x 135 pixels in size, you will be given the opportunity to crop it.  If you save an image and attempt to replace it with an image with the same name, a commonly observed issue is that the old image will still be cached for a time.  But if you delete the old image from your media library and upload a new version (or simply upload a new version of the image under a different name), it will eventually work for you.

Please let blogs@rice.edu know if you observe any other issues with this new feature.