And now, a word from our esteemed (and ever-so-awesome) Director of Technology, Stefan Antonowicz, on our upcoming site migration. — Gareth
Hi Everyone,
Over the weekend, we’re going to be transitioning the MAKE and CRAFT blogs from Movable Type to WordPress. Unfortunately, MT hasn’t been cutting it for us lately, and the requests and frustrations from our readers have been piling up. Sometimes, you can fix it, other times, you need to bury it in some deep, dark hole, beneath a full moon. We’re going with option B.
You may experience some “funkiness” over the next few days, especially Sunday, on the blogs. (Hilarious example: today, we accidentally put the staging domain in the round robin DNS for our site while we were prepping for the site switchover on Sunday. Hijinks ensued. We rolled back the error, but it took awhile for the changes to stick. There was a monsoon of angry emails, and I wept like a baby, cowering under my desk until the “all clear” was sounded by an intern whose sole purpose is to look at my emails with fresh, unjaded eyes).
“What’s in it for me?!” you may wonder, cheekily. I’m moderately glad you asked. We’re hoping for a few things, including:
* The site going more fasterer. We’ve implemented some native and homegrown caching solutions, and have pushed all of our assets out to a CDN. This should make your experience of the site zippier.
* Commenting getting unborked. As of this writing, we’re moving comments to Disqus. You’ll be able to log in with Facebook Connect, OpenID, Twitter’s OAuth, and/or Yahoo (as well as a Disqus account if that’s how you roll). Comments moving forward should be fine, but some of the legacy comments may be temporarily unavailable. Please be patient there. There have been a lot of (justifiable) complaints over the commenting system, so we’re hoping this improvement will be worthy and appreciated.
* Being able to do some business-y things more easily. This has nothing to do with you personally, directly, but as we know Underwear => ? => Profit, so this will make us wealthy beyond our wildest dreams of avarice. We just wanted to let you know that, as we’re posting things from our yachts off the shores of a country only rich people know about (e.g. Stenborgia. See? You’re already reaping the benefits of this migration).
In all seriousness, our teams have been working really hard on this, and it will be a huge boon for our small tech team to have a more stable environment to work from, one that has the tools we think we need going forward, and one that’ll hopefully help us do a better job of providing a great platform for showcasing all of cool stuff the DIY universe has to offer.
While I’ve never had one of these processes go completely smoothly, we should be OK here. As always, you can email me at webmaster@makezine.com with your questions and/or concerns — I might not get back to you right away (there’s a lot to do before Sunday — and I may need to be coaxed from beneath my desk again), but I’ll do my best.
Thanks for your patience. See you on the other side.
Stefan Antonowicz — Director of Technology, MAKE/CRAFT
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