Rodent Regatta

If you haven’t experimented with Textile, you should. Here’s what I know. You can go to the Textile site and use it to create well-formed markup. You may have to scroll down the page if you’re using IE6, but you’ll find it.

If you use Movable Type, you can use Brad Choate’s plugin which ”equips” your text entry box in Movable Type with Textile’s features. It’s my understanding that Textile or a Textile plugin is standard with WordPress.

It’s also designed into Textpattern in such a way that it can be enabled or disabled. Textpattern is apparently nearing a 1.19 gamma release followed shortly by a Release Candidate 1.0. Somewhere in all of that programming, someone is going to add more features and bug fixes to Textile.

It’s my belief that this software goes further than just about any I’ve seen to insure that a weblog – made up of lots of entries on lots of days from a writer in lots of moods – will validate.

After about ten months of use, I made a switch from Radio Userland to Movable Type (MT) to write this weblog. Why? Radio was doing some strange things in my installation, and I wasn’t a coder who could prowl in the bowels of the product. I also wanted a style/design that I thought (at the time) was only available with MT.

By October of 2002, I began writing a new (Sekimori-designed) Rodent Regatta. With the May 2004 change in direction at Six Apart and the ”pay-by-the-weblog” approach to licensing, I began a search for other tools.

I thought it might be WordPress (WP). WP may yet win. Then, I began to look intently at Textpattern (Txp) and the hosting service provided by TextDrive. I like Dean Allen’s sense of style, and I like both WP and Txp for their open source PHP and MySQL approach. Why? In the weblog world, those technologies have lots of participants and avenues for enhancements, plugins, hacks, etc.

There’s another piece of this search as well. It’s important. I want a product with enough popular support to cause lots of talented designers (as well as developers) to use it, create templates for it, provide stylesheets for it and to generate a lively set of sites that converse about the product.

What I’m now realizing is that MT, WP and Txp are all at very different stages in their life cycles. WP is moving extremely fast and lots of developers are hacking the (open) source code to create their own content management systems (CMS). By the time these talented people finish with their version of WP, they have a unique tool suited to the way they write and what they want a CMS to do for them.

Work is needed on unifying the documentation and tips for WP. MT wins in that area. Textpattern is still in gamma mode. It appears the ”community” is much smaller, but that’s a completely subjective assessment. I like the direction that I believe it’s headed. The only conflict I have is trying to keep a couple of sites (this one) up and running while learning a new tool. I don’t want RR to be my test platform. I’m beginning to understand that there is some way to have a completely functional test platform/weblog with all of these tools, without making that ”lab” publicly visible. [Note:I’m anxious to accomplish this step!]

I’m also learning that designer assistance – for tags, templates, markup, css and migration help – is somewhat sparce in the Txp world – for now. However, I’m told that as the product moves toward ”release candidate 1.0” status, that will change. Good designers and developers are (likely) to create the equivalent of Blogstyles for Txp, a plugin directory, as well as other tools, hacks and tips.

All of this may have been completely obvious to others, but the stages of these various products along the maturity curve weren’t obvious to me until recently. Getting all of these resources to truly unified and easy-to-use sites for each product (as compared to MT) will take some time. I’m convinced it will happen and WP and Txp will have large enough user communities to insure that the products are functionally equal or superior to MT for the weblog writer.

Design By Fire is providing Gurus vs. Bloggers, Round 2. This, taken with Round 1 and the Post Game Show, provides a glimpse into the skills and abilities of designers.

At what point do designers really concentrate on a specialty? Is developing and designing weblogs considered a lower-level activity? Do all designers aspire to be the one to redesign the New York Times site or some other high-profile site?

Is there a happy middle-ground where weblog projects, small business sites and some corporate identity work makes a nice living?

In the wee hours I received two comments to this weblog from Anil Dash who is Vice President of Business Development for Six Apart. Anil was interested in features that I’m looking for that might make me switch from Movable Type. He also responded to my public inquiry about how quiet the company seems to have become.

Here’s how I answered Anil this morning:

Anil:

Thanks very much for your comments. Certainly I would never encourage a business in extremis to act or react with undue haste. Having worked with a number of large corporate crises, I’d avoid suggesting any course of action that might make things worse. Your comment to me gives a much better indication of how you and your coworkers are viewing the situation, its magnitude, your customers and the urgency of the matter.

As for features that make me want to switch, I don’t think of a single competitor’s feature that would prompt a change. Similarly, I can’t think of a single software feature that, if added, would be sufficient to retain me as a customer.

Movable Type – now Six Apart – has had an enviable reputation as customer-oriented. I think it is the handling of changes and communication with customers that makes me look for alternatives. As an outsider to this ”event,” I see many others who have switched for similar reasons.

One lesson learned from years in business is that there are diplomatic ways to ”fire” certain customers or customer segments. Your developer edition, the pricing structure and your announcements concerning the commercial demand for your products and services may be signals that the real growth of Six Apart will be funded not by individuals, but by larger corporate clients. That’s fine; and absent the demands of a support-intensive set of individuals, you may well flourish under the alternative strategy. Clearly, the things you are measuring in your business are telling you what to do and which markets to pursue.

Again, I appreciate your comments and the insight you’ve provided into how you’re approaching the recent changes.

Regards,

Steve

Steve Pilgrim
www.rodentregatta.com

• * * UPDATE * * * I’m not completely certain how the skillset differs between one who is considered a ”developer” vs. one who is considered a ”designer.” Someone once said, designers make things look pretty. I think it goes well beyond that. Whatever the case, Six Apart is clearly focusing its effort and energy on a class of customers it calls ”developers.” The market overlap between those who might use LiveJournal or Blogger and those who would use Movable Type or Expression Engine is getting removed.

TypePad is the (recurring revenue) service that Six Apart offers to those who might be considering Blogger or LiveJournal. Movable Type is a tool for developers. You’ll have to be the judge of what skills you must possess to be called a developer!

>From what I’ve seen, the skilled people who are using tools built around PHP and MySQL are clearly developers. Most of the time they know the other elements of L-A-M-P such as Linux and Apache. The hue-and-cry over 6A’s moves has energized WordPress and Textpattern along with others.

At some point, the skills people possess must be marketed. To do that developers must appeal to business people. Business people think in terms of cost, time and what’s-in-it-for-me. If you are capable of saying, ”I can take your two Movable Type sites, change the look slightly, move them to Textpattern (or Expression Engine, WordPress, etc.) and preserve the functionality you now have in those sites,” you have an incredible business proposition to make. If you can also say those things and put a time and cost estimate against it, you’ll stay just as busy as you want to stay!

Dean Allen is the author/programmer behind Textpattern. The first release candidate for Textpattern is not yet out. The software is in ”gamma” mode. There is enough known about Textpattern to note several key attributes:

• it’s a writer’s tool
• it’s based on PHP and MySQL
• it’s a rich environment for creating standards-compliant sites
• Textpattern’s support forums have several calls for help moving from other tools

These things make it pretty clear that the right designer could hang out a shingle offering migration and design assistance and probably be (profitably) busy for many months.

This isn’t about merely being a ”good” designer. It’s about having very specific skills. It’s not enough to graduate from law school if you’re planning to specialize in asbestos litigation. The same is true here. Knowing XHTML and CSS isn’t sufficient; nor is knowing Movable Type tags.

In this particular case, knowing how to move all of the functionality, look, feel, style and data from a Movable Type weblog to a comparable Textpattern weblog is the challenge. Once someone proves they know how to do this, they’ll write their own ticket. The business of web design gets specialized under these rules, and specialists always make more!

>From that point, they can ”name their price.” All they’ll have to do is quote dependable target dates and be willing to communicate with rookies. If someone is ambitious, it could be an outstanding opportunity.

Maybe I’m naive about what’s important to designers. Maybe this opportunity is like asking Michelangelo, ”what will you charge to paint my bathroom?” I don’t think so.

The fact is I have two MT weblogs I’d like to move to Textpattern. I’d like to make some design changes. I’d like to set up one or two ”private” test or learning weblogs, so that I can learn Textpattern, PHP, MySQL, how the designer was able to move my old weblogs, where the tags go, etc. In other words, I want to keep writing what I write, but I want a place to learn how to do things with the tools. I’m not inclined to ”experiment” with my live sites.

There’s gold in them hills – for the right person!