And so the adventure begins.
I wrote my first blog hosting app in 1999. Poor thing was a barely-there knock-off of Blogger, but it got the job done for my users. A few months later, I integrated it into the forum app I developed in ’98, allowing every forum member to have a blog connected to their account. The two apps weren’t tightly coupled; they only shared a user database and a frameset, really. But it was a big first step.
In 2001, I launched the beta version of what would become JournURL, a complete hybrid discussion/blogging community platform, and 2003 brought the formal, general-purpose release. JournURL did all the stuff that people associate with a forum (threading, profiles, and so on), along with all the blogging staples of the day. It also perched on the bleeding edge in a number of areas… syndication feeds for everything the system produced, FOAF, Friendfeed-style import of external feeds, posting/reading via email, granular permissions for shared categories, “snap off” threading that allowed control over thread drift, collaborative blogging, EXIF and ID3 data extraction, and a lot more.
Unfortunately, even after a (very) brief spurt of launch publicity, my contemporaries at Blogger, Livejournal, and SixApart saw their user counts swell while mine stagnated and eventually evaporated. I sucked at PR on virtually every level, and stubbornly refused to seek outside funding. Everyone else grew their development teams, while I convinced myself that I could Do It All Myself. I was wrong. And because I had built the app using Coldfusion instead of something like PHP or Perl, open-sourcing it to get extra help just didn’t seem like it would be worth the effort.
So as the years have passed, it has become increasingly difficult to motivate myself to keep working on JournURL, and I’ve begun to feel that I’ve been letting down myself and my handful of remaining users. I’ve wanted to return to more frequent and extensive blogging, and the ol’ workhorse’s writing interface was last refreshed in 2005… it took the dawn of 2009 for me to realize how long we’d gone without upgrades and modernization.
Enter WordPress MU. I installed it a few days ago and began tentatively exploring its capabilities, requirements, and limitations. As should be expected, I’ve discovered things I like, things I don’t, and a number of things that flat-out confuse me. It isn’t the perfect realization of community blogging that some folks have suggested, and the setup and user experience is inconsistent at best… I’ve gotta say, getting a detailed look at WP has made me feel a lot better about how much I was able to accomplish on my own. But nitpicks and quibbles aside, with the right massaging and plugins, WPMU may just be the blogging platform that takes me and my users into the future.
Expect praise and bitching as I continue to play with it and migrate people to this new environment. Should be interesting.