Blog Hosting

Self-service blog platform for the Columbia community, hosted by CUIT.

CUIT provides free hosting for blogs by the Columbia University community on WordPress, an open source platform. A blog is essentially a website, though often is somewhat informal. The content is organized by "posts", typically organized in reverse chronological order (most recent at top). Your blog address would be https://blogs.cuit.columbia.edu/${UNI}.

Please note Columbia Blogs is a shared environment, which limits the selection of WordPress plugins to those that are acceptable across the entire shared environment. Unfortunately this means that sometimes it’s not possible to export your existing WordPress site from another hosting provider and import it into CUIT’s WordPress installation.

If you would like to start a new blog, CUIT’s WordPress platform is a perfect starting point. If you’re part of a department or organization and would like to have a website, CUIT encourages you to consider Columbia Sites, which offers self-service, branded website templates for free.

FAQ

Members of the Columbia community with a valid UNI are entitled to an individual blog. Upon log in with your UNI and password, you will be connected to your “dashboard” page, where you can visit your new blog, edit entries, etc.

Student groups, administrative groups, and other organizations within Columbia may also request a blog. To do so, please email [email protected] with your request, including your UNI and a description of the blog you need.

If you are taking or teaching a course at Columbia and would like a blog for your class, please use Columbia's EdBlog instead.

To allow others to contribute to or administer your blog, navigate to your blog’s dashboard, select “Users,” and click “Add UNIs.” Enter each UNI (not email address) on its own line. Select an appropriate role and click “Provision Users.”

Send mail to [email protected] with a link to the plugin or theme you wish to add. If the request is not too onerous, we will install the plugin or theme for you. However, we cannot install every plugin and theme as some are not stable or cause conflicts with other plugins/themes. Additionally, CUIT has to consider the upkeep for the plugin: the security patches and other aspects of all plugin need to be kept up-to-date. However, we will honor as many requests as is feasible.

Each blog has a limit of 50MB for uploaded files, e.g. images, with a per-file limit of 8MB.