"Wish I had a way to stay curious instead of working hard getting all serious" - Aquanote, One Wish
It's time to explain how negroplease.com (which I really should go ahead and domain map over here instead of doing the code redirect) ended up as a typepad site.
It's a sad tale of a glitch in a tool that I once loved and now consider more nuisance than a functioning program.
I started negroplease.com on blogger before eventually moving to movable type. I explain all that here (I think). I've always had a love/hate relationship with the tool. I'm a content guy and don't really care for getting under the hood of a product to make it tick the way I want it to and my early frustrations with MT had to do with that aspect. I couldn't just take it out the box, so to speak, and go to work.
However, once it was working (and I believe I started with 1.6 or something), it was brilliant. Archives, organization, comment management, and the most important, the input and posting of content, worked very well.
Over the past 2 years, I've been less enamored. The slow rebuilds (until recently), the comment spam (which required plug-ins to battle) and then, the new beast trackback spam, reared it's ugly head. It was my downfall.
On November 1st, I was hit with well over 1000 trackback spams with no end in sight. The load was such a burden on my site host that they shut down my site. I could've done a re-install of MT but, you know what, I didn't install and use the tool just to spend the majority of my time managing it's flaws.
A majority of what MT had become was less about content and more about dealing with spam. These are flaws. Flaws that folks have been aware of for awhile and that should be addressed but, for whatever reason, they aren't.
Typekey is a solution but it's not the right one. It doesn't leave you signed in across all MT enabled blogs. Despite requests to remember you at sites, it doesn't and blogs aren't messageboards. It shouldn't be a requirement to register in order to comment. In fact, many people who only read blogs and don't post on them are simply opposed to having to register for anything.
And so, I switched to typepad. Now, I think typepad is a cool tool. I don't have to think about it. I can just log in and go but I've lost the ability to host it on my own server. What if typepad goes down? What if it needs maintenance? What if I want to do something cool that typepad hasn't thought of yet. I'm limited.
That said, I like it here. It's a tool that does it's job.
MT, on the other hand, has stopped being a useful tool. Users of a tool can't be expected to spend all their time managing the tool because then it's no longer a tool, it's a problem.
It's the reason people seek out Firefox over IE right now. It's the reason mac lovers have such disdain for microsoft OS. We just want our shit to work and work the way it's intended.
So, basically, MT killed negroplease.com and now I'm here.
If you want the super geek version of how things like this are happening around blogs, check out Daily Whim's piece.
Also, if you only read the rss feed of negroplease.typepad.com, you're missing out.
I use del.icio.us for my remaindered links and you can subscribe to that. I link to good stuff. I promise you this.
For example, other blogger tech nerd goodness I've bookmarked in del.icio.us recently have been the following:
A great piece on copyright law and bloggers.
The Media Drop's look at Jason Kottke vs. Sony.
Also, you're missing out on the random flickr pics that show up there. You can subscibe to that., too.
Meet the new place, not really same as the old place.