Spun

UPDATE wp_posts SET comment_status='closed';
DELETE FROM wp_comments;

Sorry folks, comments here on Spun are now disabled - the spam got the better of me. I know, I know, there are plugins to help manage it, but I simply don’t have the time. Email me your thoughts on posts to ginatrapani at gmail.

While I think the result still looks very much like a blog and not as much as a magazine as I’d like (why must CMSes influence their output so much?!), this tutorial on How to use WordPress to run a magazine may come in handy some day.

Placement of the “Mark all” links on the WordPress comment moderation page is giving me RSI. I couldn’t interface design my way out of a paper bag, but this one bugs the hell out of me.

veryplaintxt is a very nice WordPress theme.

Ever since I started posting to Lifehacker several times a day, I’ve developed a deep resentment for the software that publishes the site, MovableType. There are days when it takes between 40 and 50 seconds to publish a single post. Fifty seconds probably doesn’t sound like a long time to you, but when you do it a couple of dozen times a day - what with edits and updates - we’re talking about almost half an hour of my life, snatched from me. I’m a perpetual mugging victim.
I sit at my computer every day watching MT publish each post at the pace of a tiny, moist snail travelling across a vast stone and I can feel myself getting old. Any software that gives you the time to deeply consider the seconds of your life ticking away, any software that makes you hate it by evoking the image of yourself hurdling from cradle to grave while gazing at its wrench logo - this is not software to be used by someone who is not a masochist.
Now, I have to give MT the benefit of the doubt. It may not be MT that’s slow - it may be a non-performant plugin, or the fact that over 20 editors are posting to 17 sites using one MT installation (though that doesn’t seem too unreasonable for a multi-user system). It may be that our servers are shitty (though I doubt it, Nick’s thrown some serious cash at our server situation and hosting facility). The folks at SixApart (one of whom is my friend - hi Anil!) did an amazing thing with MovableType, which was raise the bar for personal publishing systems way higher than Blogger set it.
But that was then.
Now, Gawker’s got a tech team of talented people who are unable to figure out what makes MT so freaking slow even working with SixApart support to figure it out. Now, we’ve got comments publishing in batch - not real-time - because the servers couldn’t handle MT’s heavy republishing process. We’ve got a publishing server sync’ing to front-end web servers - because one server couldn’t handle MT’s heavy republishing process plus the serving of static HTML files which costs, oh I don’t know, nothing. We’ve got ME pulling my HAIR out every day simply trying to get my job done with a tool that, from this user’s perspective, feels nothing but broken. The fact that the TypePad site I contribute to, Misbehaving, is raped by uncontrollable spam comments every day only confirms my distrust of the MT codebase.
My brief experience here with WordPress and a few useful plugins, in comparison, has been heaven.
And so the next raising of the bar.

Having built this site in one day using free web publishing tool WordPress for the first time on a production weblog, I must say I’m impressed.

I’ve spent the last 6 months publishing 12 posts a day under a tight schedule on Lifehacker using SixApart’s MovableType, Gawker Media’s CMS of choice. Otherwise I’ve only used my own publishing system. Given my experience, a few of WordPress’ features really knocked my socks off. On the other hand, there were things I reasonably expected WP to do out of the box which it didn’t. Also, in many ways I can see that WP is inaccessible to the non-technical user.

Here are some off-the-cuff thoughts about WordPress, in some cases as compared to MT. Read the rest of this entry »