WordPress Adventurers
Techark sponsored some hosting for us. That allowed me to set up each participant with their own server space so they could go ahead and upload files, install the blog and just enjoy their own individual space.
We had a few glitches: I originally set things up around 2 weeks ago and had either forgotten to set up individual FTP users for the class, or had decided to handle things another way and then forgot what I’d decided. It took only a few minutes though to set up the FTP users.
Then I neglected to have participants use their unique IDs as prefixes for the tables. Much confusion and hilarity ensued as people viewed not the blog the thought they’d set up, but someone else’s blog. I took advantage of the tea break to clean out the database tables, amend everyone’s wp-config files and get them back to a correct and useful installation starting point.
Some of the more ‘glass-half-full’ type participants pointed out this gave them an opportunity to observe the real-world problems that can arise with blogs. I must say they are a very generous group. 
All in all though I feel it was a very successful day. Once we’d ironed out those few gltches people were soon up and running with their new blogs. They asked lots of interesting questions and expressed enthusiasm for what they were learning.
Tomorrow we move on to hard stuff: customising themes and discovering a little bit about PHP and MySQL. It should be challenging and extremely rewarding.
Oh, and I did my first book-signing by request. Quite a momentous occasion.
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