Well I am now back up and running.  My host has been down for the last hour so I have been researching more things about Open Source in the k12 space.  But, that is not what this post is about.  This post is all about what I have done to get blogs setup and running on this installation of Drupal.  It has been interesting to take a look at all of the other modules that are available to make your blog more, I hate to say it, blog like.  So here are the modules I currently have installed specifically to augment my Drupal blog.

Installed Modules:

There are probably others that I should install like one of the captcha modules and some SPAM modules and maybe a module to allow the counting of content by tag, but for the most part I think I have covered the bases.  If I have missed something please let me know.

On the multiping settings page I tried a number of ping services and these are the ones that I have currently working:

These seem to work most of the time.  I will try the ping after post setting on this post and will update the post if it doesn't work correctly.  From what I have read, if it chokes with the ping on post setting you can just have cron take care of it later and it should be fine.  I like this module because you can go to the Multiping settings page (or your logs area) and see when the sites were last pinged.Here we go!