In my attempts to embrace some new technologies, which includes this wordpress blog site and more recently my Moodle site and courses, I spent this afternoon installing Elgg on my server. Elgg is a social media platform that offers much control and freedom. It’s from elgg.org. The base ‘elgg’ is rather basic, but there are tons and tons of plugins that offer many customized features.

The Landing at Athabasca University is an example of an Elgg site. It supports discussion and three of my courses (COMP444 – Robotics, COMP348 – Java Network Programming, and COMP601 – Survey of Computing and Information Systems). It’s quite a rich environment, and I wanted to play with such stuff, hence the Elgg installation.

It’s located at http://elgg.huntrods.com but doesn’t have  much yet. Mostly it’s a sandbox for me to learn.

I tried installing elgg a while ago, and it simply didn’t work. As it turns out today, thanks to some expert help from colleague Jon Dron, it was a permissions problem (both group membership and permissions). Once that was cleared up the installation proceeded uneventfully.