Thanks, robgambrill.

That is just for the "Contact Us" function. Just FYI.

Just for the record, at the bottom of the log-in page it says...
Powered by Olark Live Chat.
... I knew I saw that somewhere.

Thanks for responding, jbaker, and it's nice to meet you. I started looking at Wordpress last night. This is totally a new thing for me. You have given me some good direction. Thanks.

Thanks, Robbie.

I have a few suggestions. I'm also happy to offer further thoughts or answer any questions after you see this.
To answer a question above ... GaltsGulchOnline.com is custom built. It is not based on publicly available blog or cms software.

My 3 suggestions based on what you said you need are:
1. Wordpress - using the hosting at wordpress.com. I believe they have a free tier.
2. Weebly - or some other similar service
3. Jekyll - in conjunction with some hosting like GitHub pages. Jekyll is a markup language and so this gives you some more flexibility in some ways.

For the comments. You can ~probably~ plug in Disqus comments on whatever you do and that would likely work just fine for what you need. There are many advantages of going that route not the least of which is the fact that they support a wide range of authentication providers. This would allow your students to get engaged with very little getting in their way.

Again, I'm happy to follow up with more detail or other ideas if you like.

I've never heard of jbaker. Thanks for the lead.

have you asked jbaker yet?

https://bfi.org/about-fuller/big-ideas/w...

Fuller was rather eccentric. His books were kinda odd; He used his own vocabulary. But he had enough success to acquire a name for himself. Major claim to fame was the Geodesic Dome.

I like the Gulch's format, too. That's why I asked this group. It is very well organized. I have done a little HTML coding, but never anything like the Gulch Online.

We used blackboard, tried canvas, switched to notepad, adopted whiteboard, and realized that we still hadn't put anything on line yet. --giggles--

Sorry, I just can't resist sometimes...

Seriously, I like the Gulch format - seems to work well. Our phpBB sites are so holey they should call them Ganesha-Buddha 8.0... every time we put a patch in, the spammers attack around it.

No, this is new to me, although buckminsterfullerene is very well known to me.

B.T.W. Have you ever heard of Buckminster Fuller's World Game? Students try to solve the worlds problems with the resource's available on planet earth.

I came across it while doing war game stuff in the early 80's. I think the World Game is online now.

Thanks for the tip, khalling.

j, pm Euda

We used Blackboard a number of years ago, switched to something else, and this semester, we are switching to Canvas. I have always just used e-mail for communication and put my content onto a password-protected web site rather than keep up with the constant switching of software. Thanks for the tip. An answer was staring me in the face, and I didn't even think of it.

Maybe custom . http://www.whatcms.org says it can't detect which one the site is using. The olark stuff and habla chat stuff make me think it might be some form of joomla.

You guys don't have blackboard? I just take college courses evening when I can spare the cash but the Missouri schools use that. http://www.blackboard.com