Hello everyone. We have received complaints regarding the functionality of UThink/Movable Type when using Firefox, specifically the Firefox 16 upgrade released during the week of October 8, 2012. Complaints include the inability to attach categories to entries, the inability to resize entry boxes and even the inability to write entries.

If you suddenly have some of these problems, and you are using Firefox, please check to see what version you are using. If you are using 16 please give another browser a try, such as IE, Safari, or Chrome.

People across the Internet are also complaining about Firefox 16 functionality with other applications such as Twitter and Facebook. Hopefully Firefox will release a new, patched version soon.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause. Please contact uthink@umn.edu with any questions.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause. Please contact uthink@umn.edu with any questions.

UThink, a service offered by the University Libraries with support from the Office of Information Technology (OIT), is intended to aid in teaching and learning, scholarly communication, and individual expression, and provide support for personal, curricular, and scholarly communications conducted by the University community. The service is available to any current faculty, student, or staff member of the Twin Cities campus.

The event will focus on the various uses for UThink, including blogging and less well-known, unique uses the service can provide in an academic setting. Presentations by UThink site creators from the College of Education and Human Development, School of Public Health and the Humphrey Institute are planned. Attendees also will have an opportunity to ask questions of the panel. Refreshments will be served.

Those interested in attending the event should R.S.V.P. via www.oit.umn.edu/news-events/register. The event also will be available via UMConnect at www.umconnect.umn.edu/uthink.

Once again, we are upgrading the software that runs UThink, Movable Type, to MT 4.31 this Sunday March 14. This means that UThink will be unavailable from approx. 7:00 AM through 9:00 AM. Blogs will still be available during this time, but the administration interface will be unavailable. It will also be necessary to periodically reboot the server which obviously will bring the entire system down, but the reboots will be intermittent and not time consuming.

Of course, we are very sorry for any inconvenience this causes. This upgrade will allow us to make adjustments that will increase the speed of the service, fix software bugs, and create new system functionality.

Please let us know if you have any questions at uthink@umn.edu.

The easiest way around this problem is to not use MS Word to write out blog entries. If you do, copy and paste your entry into Notepad (or TextPad for the Mac) before you paste the entry into Movable Type.

If you already have a bunch of entries created, I have found a nifty little website that will strip out nasty Microsoft code:

Microsoft Mess Cleaner

It says it is only for MS Word 2000, but I have found that it works with newer versions of Word too.

Anyway, here is hoping future versions of Movable Type address this issue. Until then, watch out when you use Microsoft Word! Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

This downtime is unfortunately unavoidable. Again, hopefully it will only last a couple of hours during the typically low-traffic time of Sunday morning.

UThink is now also listed on the University System Staus page.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Actually, it is our hope that UThink will only be down for a couple of hours beginning at 5:00am, but in these cases it is wise to plan for the worst. UThink is one of many systems that will be affected.

This downtime is unfortunately unavoidable. Again, hopefully it will only last a couple of hours during the typically low-traffic time of Sunday morning.

UThink is now also listed on the University System Staus page.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.

• Tips to Become a Better Blogger (Sponsored by the Digital Media Center/University Libraries)
  When? 12:00 to 12:30 p.m.
  Where?101 Walter Library (no pre-registration is necessary)


• 5 Tools to Write & Cite (Sponsored by the Digital Media Center/University Libraries)
  When? 12:45 to 1:15 p.m.
  Where? 101 Walter Library (no pre-registration is necessary)

Please see the complete list of events at http://writing.umn.edu/dayonwriting/index.html

Starting in April of 2004, UThink has been a big part of writing on campus for over 5 years now. According to UThink statistics, there have been over 141,000 entries written on the system. That is a fair amount of writing!

Of course, with all these entries it has been impossible to read them all, but that doesn't stop me from trying to read what I can. But in monitoring the system over these 5 years, of all the entries, one stands out as my favorite during all this time:

Nibbled to death by small geese from The Deception of the Thrush

I encourage you to read it. You won't be disappointed.

And as part of the "National Day on Writing" I want to try a little experiment. The UThink system lets you build blogs based on contents from other blogs. So, I've set up a blog that will display any new entry tagged as "dayonwriting" ... in other words, any entry written on the UThink system that is tagged as "dayonwriting" will show up on this blog. Here it is:

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/dayonwriting/

A couple of things to keep in mind:

• If you have an older blog (a blog created before June 15, 2009) and you try to use the new features of UThink (like tagging or the new styles) your blog will not be able to handle this new functionality properly. An older blog will still be using the old MT 3.* templates, so it won't have the correct template tags to display tags, for example. To fix this problem, to bring your blog up to speed using MT 4.25 templates, you may follow these instructions. Warning! Updating your templates to the new MT 4.25 templates will probably remove any customizations you have on your blog! So be careful when using these instructions!


• Secondly, there is a whole lot of instructions and new documentation located on the UThink Technical FAQ Wiki. It is my hope that some of your most basic questions will be answered by all the updated documentation on this wiki. So check it out! And if you've got something to add, feel free!


• And while I say that UThink has upgraded successfully, there most definitely could still be some problems. I haven't had time to look at all 7,892 individual blogs on the system yet. We are aware that there still could be some problems and we will do our best to fix those problems as soon as we are made aware of them.

Of course, if you have any questions regarding your blog, or regarding this upgrade and all the new functionality, please let me know at uthink@umn.edu. I honestly don't know what to expect regarding the volume of questions I will receive ... could be a lot, could be a little. Whatever the case, I am expecting some, so fire away.

I'd like to thank the JaWS programmers who made this upgrade possible: Douglas Lochowski-Haney and Alina Rimbu! Thanks a ton guys! You've done some great work!

Also, the upgrade of UThink would not have been possible without a generous grant provided by the College of Liberal Arts Student Technology Fee Committee. Thank you!

Again, if you have any questions, fire away! Happy blogging!

1. Monday morning (6/15), access to the Movable Type will be cut off. Blogs are still accessible, but no commenting or editing will work.
2. During the day, probably early afternoon, work will be done to get the data transferred and upgraded and all the new code in place.
3. Sometime during the day, we will cut of access to the blogs as well as Movable Type and run the upgrade script.
4. If all is successful, we switch the DNS so that "blog.lib.umn.edu" points at the new Movable Type configuration. We may also create a new alias at "uthink.lib.umn.edu."
5. If the the upgrade has finished without any complications, we let people through to both the new UThink/Movable Type and the blogs.

Thanks for your patience everyone. We are excited to finally bring Movable Type 4.25 to all of you. As always, please let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Why June 15th? According to the academic calendar it is the first day of the 2009 Summer term. If we don't do it now, we will probably have to wait until August to minimize disruption.

We have spent the past three months getting ready for this upgrade. All of the issues and problems we have identified in the previous entry and in other forums have either been addressed or fixed. This upgrade won't be without its own problems, but we are confident we have prepared the system as best we can. Of course, as is the case with many application unveilings, you don't learn about all the problems until users start using the system for real. Again, though, we are hopeful that we will have as seamless upgrade as possible.

Having said that, there will be some issues, especially for those of you with existing blogs:

• Existing blogs will not have all the functionality of Movable Type 4. This is because existing blogs are currently using templates developed in MT 3. Existing blogs will function fine in the new system and will fully migrate, but new features like tagging or page creation or custom fields will not work unless the existing blog templates are modified to include the tags that make the new functionality work.


• Having said that, I am going to spend this week writing as much documentation as possible on how to make the most out of the new functionality available. I am going to put most of this documentation both on this blog and on the Technical FAQ Wiki Of course, since it is a wiki, it is my hope that after the upgrade other UThink users will feel compelled to write other how-to's about the new UThink functionality. Feel free!


• The current functionality of MT 3 will be retained in MT 4, however in many cases it will work differently, or it will be administratively found in different locations within the interface. For example, this is most definitely true of the BlogRoller functionality (the functionality many people use to create lists of links to favorite web sites on their blog homepages). Again, documentation will be prepared to address as many of these issues as possible.

At this time I'd like to thank Alina Rimbu and Douglas Lochowski-Haney of OIT Academic Computing for making this upgrade happen. Thanks guys! It has been a pleasure to work with you both!

I'd also like to thank the College of Liberal Arts Student Technology Fee Committee for the grant that made this upgrade possible. UThink would not be going through an upgrade without this financial assistance, and I sincerely appreciate the committee's belief in the merits of the project. So, from the bottom of my heart, thank you!

Again, Monday June 15th the UThink blog system will be upgraded. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns!

Overall, testing has gone well. I think the bulk of the new functionality has been working as expected. There has just been a few things that have, again, surfaced as true bugs.

• Guest Internet IDs don’t seem to be working
• System Overview -> Select a new Blog – shows all blogs, should only show user’s blogs
• Add users screen – Choices for user permissions are being cut off.
• Conversion problems
• Blogs that use the comments popup need to be automatically switched to point at the Individual Archive Template. The popup will no longer work in MT 4.2.
• Page creation on existing blogs is buggy. In fact, the system doesn't seem to publish a new page at all. On new MT 4.2 blogs pages publish fine.
• Removal of the old captcha plugin script is problematic in some blogs. It removes the captcha javascript, and also most of the comment form, including the submit button.
• There seems to be a problem with the "Action Stream" blog type. What this blog type is supposed to do is show a record of all the user's activity on the system. So, if you have three blogs and post in all them, the Action Stream should show all the activity on these three blogs. Right now, the Action Stream is flat out buggy. We'll look into it, but we may need to drop this blog type for now.
• On "Community Blogs" commenting seems to be broken. Brings up the error: "Text was entered wrong"
• Lots of bugs and confusion regarding the Privacy Plugin feature (this plugin should help make blogs private to only listed U of M Internet IDs). We will definitely try to fix these issues.

Finally, there are three plugins I'd also like to have installed before we launch:

• Template Exporter (http://plugins.movabletype.org/template-exporter/)
• Image Gallery (http://plugins.movabletype.org/image-gallery/ … I’ve also asked about pricing for BlogShow -- http://plugins.movabletype.org/blogshow-mt/)
• Custom Field Search (http://plugins.movabletype.org/customfieldssearch/)

Those should make the new UThink even better. Let me know if any other plugins look worth while.

Finally, as you might have noticed, we have pushed back our date to officially make the upgrade. I am hopeful we can make the switch in the next two weeks, depending on how quickly we can fix all these problems.

Thanks again to everyone that is testing the new system! Let me know if you find any more issues!

I have already contacted a bunch of people to test existing blogs in the system to make sure that they transfer properly when we finally go live. However, I really need people to test the creation of new blogs, new entries, and to try all the new blog/site types we have (Classic blog, Community blog, Professional website, Forum).

So, would you be willing to test this beast out? If so, contact me at uthink@umn.edu.

There are some known issues so far:

1. Creating "Pages" within existing blogs does not seem to work. "Pages" in new blogs seems to work great.
2. Guest Internet IDs do not seem to work.
3. Creating private blogs is a little (actually a lot) buggy. In fact, you may just want to ignore that for now.

Also, due to new functionality within Movable Type (the software that runs UThink) we will now be publishing all blogs through SSL (https). There are pros and cons with this, but it is what it is. Most systems at the U that require x.500 (U of M Internet ID) integration are published through SSL. Unfortunately, UThink can no longer be an exception.

So, again, let me know if you'd like to be a tester. We hope to upgrade at the end of May, so there isn't much time left to get this right! Thanks!