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New York, 6:41 AM
Sun Nov 29
12 posts in the last 24 hours
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08/06/09
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Easy to use CMS' are just that easy to use. WYSIWYG. Require comparatively little technical knowledge.
The user base will tend to reflect that. The activities of that user base will tend to reflect it as well. As someone earlier mentioned, that's why those metrics are not necessarily bragging rights.
Someone advanced enough to create their own CMS engine (I'll finish mine some day if I'm ever sober long enough) probably spends more time on researching their posts than delighting in spending 10 hours tweeting things like "I just ate a tuna fish sandwich."
The whole reblogging, retweeting, blah takes a lot of time to go through to find things to re:. I went from Joomla down to wordpress because the ease of use left me free to do other pursuits. But on a power level they don't compare.
I suspect tumblr users' obsessions are similar to myspace in its heyday where all day long some friends would obsess about sparklies on their layout. Instead its reblogging.
This is why I don't think the metrics used are fully comparable.
08/06/09
as for creating your own cms, why bother? can't you find something that fits the bill? and try teaching a client how to update it or make changes to it. no thanks. i have better things to do with my day than sitting in front of a monitor rubbing my eyes, taking calls from clients' secretaries because their site isn't displaying properly.
08/06/09
The problem with extending software like WordPress is that the base is shit, lacking in any conventions and modern PHP programming techniques. Have you ever seen a serious WP install that has been extended over the years by multiple programmers? I have, and it's a disaster. If you are just talking about frontend stuff, whatever, that's for kids. I'm talking about the backend, and it's rubbish. If you just need a blog, then fine. If you need a robust site, WP isn't your solution. I'm not saying Drupal is a crystal palace, but at least they try. Still, if you know what you are doing, you can use frameworks like Zend to roll some pretty spiffy and forward looking stuff in minimal time.
Agreed though, Joomla is a disaster.
Yo Tate, double line breaks keep getting truncated on submit. What's up with that?
08/06/09
08/06/09
Those of the star race have to worry about top level oversight. We in the gray ghetto have more freedom for substantive dialogue.
08/06/09
08/06/09
But to your point, substantive dialogue was to point out that i prefer being free to discuss issues that won't make the elite's top tier approval as to what they want the world to see when they view Gawker comments, as is their prerogative.
It was not to diminish your opinion on CMS in the least.
08/05/09
However to make a one-to-one comparison of "posts" or other metrics they have to mean the same thing -- for example I have a Tumblr blog with 931 posts, but I haven't logged in for more than a year. All of the posts are imported from my real blog, Twitter, Delicious, et cetera.
If David (who I haven't met yet, but I'm sure we will at some point) is up for it, it would be cool to see a breakdown of "posts" into original content created on-site, imported posts, re-blogs, which are conflated in their numbers. It would also be fascinating to see some numbers around types, like how many posts are quotes, photos, chat, etc.
In the interest of transparency, I'm happy to share any corresponding numbers on the WordPress.com side.
08/05/09
My experience with old fashioned blogging platforms is that I didn't have nearly as much of a compulsion to post after, say, the first two weeks, as I've had for the past year or so on Tumblr. I think this is because Tumblr's entire format allows one to post casually without feeling guilty about it, like you haven't written enough, or put in enough effort. At the same time, when you really want to punch out that long analytical post, you can. On my old blogs, I always had to think twice about whether my posts fit into a sort of serious, polished discourse. Even when I knew basically nobody would be reading them, I had this compulsion. With Tumblr, I don't feel that at all.
08/05/09
I do appreciate the platform's simplicity, but the user content on these blogs comes across as incredibly banal to me, which I think is a by-product of the overly-simple platform. But then again, maybe I'm finding the wrong blogs.
Regardless, like Twitter, until Tumblr starts making actual revenue, I don't think it should be something that's celebrated.
08/05/09
Most blogging platforms, by the way, are filled mostly with inconsequential shit, or worse yet, completely inactive/defunct blogs. The idea that Tumblr is a leading offender in this regard seems kind of absurd to me.
The key thing Tumblr does, in my opinion, is it breaks from the typical blogging platform, which has always basically been an "internet diary" format, and introduces something that really gels with the online medium. If you want to post photos/videos, for example, you can do that, and they will look just as good in your design as plain text does, with the same amount of effort invested. Unlike with standard blogs, where the long form seems to rule the day, you can post a treatise or a single sentence on Tumblr, and it somehow never seems out of place. And the community aspect, quite simply, has no parallel in current blogging platforms. The whole idea of a manually-updated "blogroll" seems kind of antiquated now.
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WordPress isn't much better. Have you ever looked at the source code for that thing? I'm pretty sure Sloth from Goonies is WP's lead developer. It's truly scary when you think about how many websites use WP as the underlying code base. Talk about a piece of shit.
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08/05/09
Sure, it might take a few months, but still...
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