Sorry to have been so uninvolved in the conversation – been working on a server upgrade (we also host Patterico, his traffic has gotten kinda big, and our configuration wasn’t working out), and thinking about revisions to Winds to present to Joe (who still, after all, owns the joint). I’m thinking of upgrading to MT 4.2, which – among other thinly-tested features, offers the ability to have multiple authors with their own blogs, and then a common presentation of the latest posts from all of them.
Users can create (or, ultimately, import from Facebook or other sites) a profile, and see in one place all the comments or blog posts they have made.
The idea might be that there would be an armedliberal.windsofchange.net, joekatzman.windsofchange.net, metrico.windsofchange.net etc. – and each of them would feed www.windsofchange.net.
It implies a few things – that we come up with some definition of what the site is ‘about’ and some core topics we want to encourage people to participate in.
So – let’s trigger a bit of a discussion in comments – does this sound like an interesting upgrade, and what features would you like to see on the site? Let’s hold off on the topics discussion for a little bit.
I would be concerned about balkanization, mainly because MT does not really have the community support that would require. Of course, it’s Perl, so building that in is probably doable (and there might already be plugins; I haven’t kept up). Mainly, MT is missing self-registration/self-administration, real comment id fidelity (and rating, and blocking and such), and anti-spam features. Your blog, but those are the issues I would be concerned with, were I considering such a split. From a participation point of view, if there’s an aggregation of posts onto a single page, then the comment threads shouldn’t be negatively affected.
Gosh, Jeff…can you think of any platform that supports those features?? <ducks, grinning> Seriously have you any experience with porting MT content to Drupal?
A.L.
I prefer things the way they are. The layout is concise and easy to follow. 2 cents.
Mainly, MT is missing self-registration/self-administration, real comment id fidelity (and rating, and blocking and such), and anti-spam features. Your blog, but those are the issues I would be concerned with, were I considering such a split. From a participation point of view, if there’s an aggregation of posts onto a single page, then the comment threads shouldn’t be negatively affected.
Not to mention that the documentation completely sux (unless something has happened in the interim since I “upgraded” in January). My page is till not anywhere resembling the way I want it, because the description of tags is arcane, and there are zero example of working site to crib from.
Also, my RSS feed has been broken ever since the “upgrade,” and I have no clue why. Not to mention all the timeouts when I post, or anyone comments…
I’m not having any problem with the site as is. I look at the author’s name, the title of the post and know if I want to read it. I’m a happy camper now. A conservative camper who wishes things to stay the same, if you wish.
I’ve just recovered from SiteMeter’s “changes” and I don’t want anyone else to do anything right now!
Of course my opinion is worth even less than 2 cents.
I haven’t worked with Drupal. I’ve worked with Slashcode, which has a lot of those features; it’s tough to configure and maintain, though.
I wouldn’t mind working with you on a test/migration, if you need the help and no Drupal expert is around. I can do it on my server (my blog is comatose anyway) and work out a content migration script. The hard part, it seems to me, would be the templates, and if Drupal has data requirements not met by the current site (such as if Drupal requires an email address and your site doesn’t). Might need a ETL script for that part.
Let me know if you’d like me to take a cut at that, or if you’ve got a specific problem you’ve encountered.
Personally I wouldn’t gain anything from the multiple separate blogs. If they continued to feed into the main one I’d just read that same as I do now; if they didn’t it would be an annoyance to have to read them separately.
Comment previews and actual commenter registration would be highest on my list.
I concur. There are multiple author blogs where I wish I could just read one or two authors (Ken Anderson’s move to Opinio Juris, for example – by my lights that has really hurt his brand). You guys don’t have that problem here and I enjoy reading pretty much everyone.
As to what is your “mission” I guess I am enough of a Burkean that I propose that should be organic and allowed to happen, rather then you all trying to find something some public policy to do and to fix. Maybe your handle – Armed Liberal – is more Liberal than Armed? /grin/
I agree with just about everyone else: I have nothing to gain, and I think the site has a lot to lose, from Balkanizing the feeds.
On the other hand, it’d be nice we stopped getting those 404 errors every week and half. Like we’re getting right now, even.
And if I were to add a true wish to the wishlist, it’d be a comment formatting mechanism that let users respond to comments and have the layout reflect that, rather than have to identify who we’re responding to in each comment. (I have no idea if that’s a simple thing or a hard thing. I assume it’s a hard thing, since it isn’t already done.)
There are plugins to do this for MT. Some of the other blogging platforms (Drupal, Slashcode) have it built in.
Now that I think about it, “actual commenter registration” is useful to combat impersonation, and as a step along the way to implementing a twit filter–neither of which addresses things that are big problems here.
But comment previews–heck yeah!
Comment registration and a preview function (didn’t we use to have that?) would definitely improve the experience. Although I’m grateful for what we have 😉
One additional wish would be if there was a way to create threads on the discussion. Sometimes the posters go off on a tangent and one or three posters end up dominating the discussion and it would be nice to have an easier way of avoiding their personal discussion and being able to respond to posts on the topic at hand.
I like the idea.
#9 MV: You’re getting 404s? Have you mentioned this to anyone offlist? 🙂 If not, please, please do.
I get 404s after A.L. makes a new entry. For a while (an hour or so?), if you press comments you get Baghdad Bob. Haven’t really timed it, so I don’t know how long it lasts, but this is a new feature the last few months.
I’m computer illiterate, so I don’t understand much of the thrust of this post. I’ll try to add some comments later.