The new Frederator Blogs platform.
Illustration by Natalie Dee
I’ve talked about our new Frederator Blogs platform for too long, so now I wanted to tell you some of the details. If there’s any bugs you find as a reader (and I’m sure you will), please let us know at theblog@frederator.com or just leave a comment here.
Probably the best thing about this change for you is the ease of finding information. The quality search over in the right column works beautifully (finally). Since we can now tag and categorize posts that gives you another way to organize and search the information that’s valuable to your particular interests. And there’s also a ‘classic’ archive list by date.
Going forward, we’ll be changing our commenting system to the community based Disqus and we’re going to be doing a lot of adjustments on how the columns work, how the link roll will be exposed (or work with drop down menus), that kind of thing. There might also be some more graphic design, but that’s not really on my mind right now. We’ll also be messing with the RSS feeds for those of you who like them.
Many of you have already asked why we’ve made the change, and a lot more have asked why we’ve waited so long?
We started the first Frederator blogs in 2004 (here and here) on the Blogger platform. But it quickly it became clear we wanted to give a voice to the incredible cartoon talent in our orbits and the technology of the day wouldn’t support us too well. We turned to our brilliant developer David Karp (soon to be the brains behind Channel Frederator) and he invented one of the very first “multi-user” blogs on top of the latest (and, of course buggy) hosting technology; it’s the design you’ve been reading us on for the last three years. By late 2006 though, it was clear that Wordpress, Blogger, and others had caught up, but by that time David was caught up in inventing yet another evolution in the medium, the brilliant Tumblr (not yet ready for multiple users, if you were going to ask), and he didn’t have time to help us move. It took quite a while, but eventually we hooked up with Rudy Jahchan (from Galacticast), David’s Chief Technologist Marco Arment, Nate Olson, and Michael Lee (our saviors) and they’ve taken care of the porting, recoding, hosting, blah blah blah blah etcetera etcetera we’ve needed to make this transition possible.
So, right now, Frederator Blogs is using the Wordpress multi-user platform, and hopefully, its flexibility will make possible all the updating we need to do in the foreseeable future.
There’s more, I’m sure, but I can’t think anymore right now. Enjoy messing around and let us know what’s going wrong at theblog@frederator.com. Thanks for being so patient and so loyal.
