Heri

I chose blogger when launching Montreal Tech Watch because it was straightforward. The setup took 5 minutes, and there I was, ready for the first post. At that time, it was just an experiment and I didn’t feel installing something else.

4 Months have passed and the blog had 224 posts, 220 comments and people who are reading it regularly (don’t ask me how many, i don’t really know). What’s more, I think there is potential for more growth. 1 week ago, I made a list of all the problems:
* the negative contrast design (ie black background with light grey font) was great for simple and minimal content, but not for pages full of “heavy” texts and pictures,
* there was no way to insert and republish feeds on the home page – and generally no other ways to extend it, apart from widgets,
* no trackbacks,
* user comments were a hassle – for everyone.

Don’t mistake me, I think blogger is a great tool. It is quick, you can publish it on your website via ftp, it integrates with Google, the tagging (“labels”) system is great. The fact that it servers static html pages was a great plus too. But it was time to move on.

I considered Typo vs WordPress. Typo runs on Ruby on Rail, and I am using it for this blog, and it’s great – although it gets 2000 trackbacks spams everyday and Typo doesn’t know how to handle that. But I chose WordPress instead, mainly because I have never used WordPress before (hey, funny way to chose a blogging platform, but I guess you have to try out what everyone else is using) and also because Ruby on Rails apps are eating RAM on the server as if there was no tomorrow.

Installing WordPress was ok. Not straigtforward. I spent a few hours trying to see what’s up with chown permissions and yum updates but I discovered finally that the php version I was using didn’t know about mysql.so – which was weird because the control panel had a working version of phpmyadmin. Anyway, I loaded manually mysql.so in the php.ini file. Still, this was easy compared to installing a Ruby on Rails app.

So far, I have imported all the content from blogger, changed internal links, and inserted a few plugins. I also erased all the previous html blogger pages, because it would duplicate content and the blog would have been sandboxed by Google, and also because it conflicted with wordpress’s .htaccess rules. This means of course that all other bloggers who linked to a post in Montreal Tech Watch would be redirected to a 404 page. I would say that was the price to pay when switching your blogging tool.

There is a new design too, with a positive contrast this time.

The design is still very raw, and it will be published to improve readibility, and the user interface.

Features wise, the biggest one is coming this week. There should be a live user-editable newsroom, much alike the guys from Information Architects Japan are doing. I am using big words here but it will be just a wiki and a blog merged togethere. Users can edit blog posts and the blog feed will be republished in the Montreal Tech Watch home page. This mean Montreal Tech Watch will be moving to a 1024 px layout and a third column will show all the news from that wiki – blog.

I have no idea though if it will work – I would have say NO before RococoCamp. And I am not sure about the workflow for a wiki blog and, yes, i am quite confident it will get spammed. But that’s the only way to get stuff like french content or news from other places in Quebec.

By the way I am looking for a name for that feature. Any ideas?
wikiroom / central / yultech …. I am open for suggestions