Makezine.com is moving this weekend

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

24 thoughts on “Makezine.com is moving this weekend

  1. volkemon says:

    WOW!

    Nice to hear it. I LOVE (LOVE) the comments, and will read many posts just because there are comments there. Even if the subject matter would not ordinarily attract me.

    I would be nicer having an (hold breath momentarily, then in a sotto voice:) Edit function……. *sigh*

    ;) Thanks!

  2. GanadoRH says:

    If we read your blog via Google Reader, will we have to change the URL it seeks? Or will this move be transparent to that service’s gathering of your posts?

  3. Brandi Weed says:

    Will this have an impact on RSS feeds?

  4. jon.netdork.net says:

    I’m not part of Make, but I do use WordPress, and the RSS url is different to that of Moveable Type. Hopefully the bright sparks at Make have realized this, and they’ll do something nice like a mod_rewrite rule to point the old RSS URL to the new one. If they haven’t, hopefully they’ll see the comments. I’m open to answer on twitter as @j_angliss if they need help ;) Even nicer would be to use FeedBurner, in case they decide to move them around again :)

  5. alex.s.myopenid.com says:

    I’m hoping this will include a multiple-archive-tag browsing system like OpenClipArt.org used to have.

  6. Stefan Antonowicz says:

    Hi guys,

    Your RSS feeds should remain the same – we’ve had the rewrite in place and everything has been testing 5×5. And @jon.netdork.net – FeedBurner will probably bet set up (rewrite again, so you don’t have to change anything!) in the next week or so, once I’m sure everything is stable.

    @volkemon – I don’t remember whether or not Disqus has an edit feature on their comments; I’ll keep my eyes open for it while I’m (re)doing the migration.

    @alex.s – Tell me more about the multiple-archive-tag browsing system. We’ll support searching by tag (like makezine.com/tag/foo), but do you recall how openclipart.org had it structured? [site]/tag/foo&bar or something similar? That’d be a potentially pretty heavy db query, just curious if you had more details.

    1. alex.s.myopenid.com says:

      “[site]/tag/foo&bar or something similar?”
      That’s pretty much exactly it – then on the side was a list of the tags contained within the results with a plus next to each… Click the tag to get just that tag, click the plus to add them together. You could avoid that overhead just by listing all tags.

      An example tag set that would have been used by me just this past week is “cellphones”+”science”, and maybe +”education”.

      1. Stefan Antonowicz says:

        Interesting, I like it. We won’t have it for this first release, but I just added it to our “enhancements” list in Bugzilla. Thanks for the note, Alex!

  7. unigamer says:

    Working comments!!

  8. Elettronica digitale says:

    Are you sure WP is the right solution for a collaborative blog?

    Sure, WP is great but it wasn’t born as CMS.
    OK, today the new version of wp can be collaborative but,
    Drupal and Joomla are really cms.

    My experience in 2007 with wp for my blog was great but when i decided to switch my blog in a collaborative blog, I understood that Drupal (number one in taxonomy and folksonomy) was the solution
    http://it.emcelettronica.com (italian) and
    http://dev.emcelettronica.com (english)
    (take vision of my blogs with appropriate terms of confront, my budget is 1/1000….. :) of your)

    So, WP -> Drupal for me was a real upgrade!

    Are You consider to switch to a real cms?
    http://php.opensourcecms.com/

  9. Maker Dino says:

    YAY FOR UPGRADES!!! Maybe I’ll be more inclined to comment now… :)

  10. volkemon says:

    WOOOOO HOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    I just used the new comments feature…. PREVIEW!!!

    THANK YOU MAKE!! I love comments even more, for now I can edit. :)

    Heh heh… gonna preview this just because I can. :):)

Comments are closed.

Discuss this article with the rest of the community on our Discord server!
Tagged

Gareth Branwyn is a freelance writer and the former Editorial Director of Maker Media. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books on technology, DIY, and geek culture. He is currently a contributor to Boing Boing, Wink Books, and Wink Fun. His free weekly-ish maker tips newsletter can be found at garstipsandtools.com.

View more articles by Gareth Branwyn

ADVERTISEMENT

Maker Faire Bay Area 2023 - Mare Island, CA

Escape to an island of imagination + innovation as Maker Faire Bay Area returns for its 15th iteration!

Buy Tickets today! SAVE 15% and lock-in your preferred date(s).

FEEDBACK