reflections

Barely a day goes by recently where a new social networking or image host springs up, only to fade to nothing and slip past everybody because of a fundamental lack of originality!

So I found it quite refreshing to learn this morning that somebody was doing something unusual with a website! Glogster is a fantastic new way to express your mood, feelings and ideas visually. The simple and intuitive interface quickly takes you a long way beyond what could be created with basic text and videos. It’s still officially in beta - but I personally feel that it’s already as slick as it needs to be!

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Ten days ago I wrote my 10 Most Stupid Client Questions Ever post - and on the same day Tara from the Graphic Design Blog submitted the article to StumbleUpon. I had no idea that she’d done this at the time though!

Over the course of the last ten days the article has received more than 32,000 views (edit: more than 45,000 as of July 1st), with about 80% of those coming from StumbleUpon users! The rest came from being on the front page of Spotplex, the Upcoming page of Digg (with 7 diggs) and the second page of Reddit - in addition to the usual traffic from Technorati and the like. At one point I was getting an alarming 10 views per second!!

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SixApart have finally released a new beta of their blogging and content management system Movable Type. MT 4.0 is the first major release of the software since 2004 - and comes with the interesting news that SixApart will be moving the application to a GPL open-source licence before the end of this year.

Ironically enough, up until the release of MT 3.0 many users treated the software as open-source - despite the fact that it wasn’t official. When SixApart decided to enforce the licence with the release of MT 3.0 it caused widespread outrage, and this may have been one of the things that took WordPress from obscurity to popularity.

The new version of Movable Type is radically different from previous versions though, with more than 50 new features - including an installation and upgrade wizard, more powerful templating, new bundled themes, and a redesigned user interface. It also integrates social media by offering simple ways to get photos, videos and audio into posts - and there’s a new ratings framework too. Scalability concerns have also been squashed with database caching - increasing the chances of surviving the Digg effect unscathed.

My Personal Experience

I download the new beta yesterday - but gave up after two hours of failing to get my new blog to display! I had to manually change CGI permissions in the root directory, set up the required MySQL database, and figure out where Sendmail was located on my server - before I could even get into the Control Panel!

The admin stuff does looks great though - with an excellent Dashboard and drop-down menu navigation. Given how much has obviously been ‘borrowed’ from WordPress though, it’s a shame it doesn’t even come close in terms of intuitiveness! It took me ages to figure out how to do anything - which might not be a problem if you’re totally green to blogging!

I’m not stupid when it comes to the Internet; I develop in PHP myself, and I’ve been using pre-written scripts and database applications for at least 8 years. I also followed the Getting Started Guide to the letter - so it’s not like I’d done something wrong! Perhaps WordPress has just made me lazy, with it all being so simple…

Special technical note: please DO NOT install MT on to the same domain as your WP blog (even if it’s in a sub-directory). It puts an index.html file into the root of the domain, which typically takes precedence over the default index.php required for WordPress. What you end up with is the MT blog coming up instead of the WP one, if you view it from the root of your domain (i.e. http://paulenderson.com). Feel free to comment if you need more on this, or if you’ve screwed up your blog like I did!

Conclusion?

Moveable Type 4.0 is definitely a step in the right direction - and it’s heart-warming to see SixApart taking the GPL route. But they’re not going to suceed in drawing people away from WordPress until they’ve seriously improved their backend. Perhaps I’ll give it another go once it’s out of beta though…

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One of my ongoing projects at the moment is Britster - a social networking site that will offer many of the popular features from sites like MySpace, YouTube and Date.com. What will make this site different to the rest though, is that fact that it’s aimed squarely at the British - including UK residents, ex-pats, and anybody else who wants to communicate with those living in Britain. My role in the project has been varied to date, and has included PHP development, online and offline marketing, corporate styling, and (of course) the design of the main website.

As research for the website design element of the project, I’ve looked at all the major existing social networking sites in a critical light, to see where I could make my own designs better. What I found really surprised me though - a general lack of quality, poor navigation and huge file downloads are common among both the leaders in the field and those vying for success

Please remember that these evaluations are purely my own opinion as a web designer. Just because I think a site sucks visually, it doesn’t necessarily mean the functionality is also lacking, as that isn’t what I’ve focused on.

I hope that any designer (web or otherwise) will find this roundup useful, as it highlights the pitfalls a designer may come across when creating a design for mass consumption - something we all have to tackle at some point in our careers. This may also be of interest to anyone else developing a site with social networking features.

Notes: clicking on any of the thumbnails will open up a full-size grab of the site in either a new tab or window. These are stored on my Flickr account, and I’ve grouped them into a set which you can view in full if you want to make comparisons! With this being a rather lengthy post, I’ve made use of a ‘read more’ break in the text, so you may need to click the title to read this article in its entirety.

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