An Early Administration Note

I am not due to write another admin note for another 10 days, but due to recent changes I thought I had better do so!

1. New Blog

In addition to our very cool forums, I have now introduced a new blog for the site which you can access here. The new blog will allow all of the admins and writers on the site to write non-list content that is of interest or relation to the main site.

At present you need to create a new login for the blog (more on this in item 3). Be sure to check it out often. There is a direct RSS feed showing the latest articles from the new blog on every page here (you will find it on the right hand side under Today in History.

2. Competitions!

There are only three more weeks before the Christmas Competition closes. Get your submissions in NOW! If you want a nice shiny new iPod for Christmas, these are your last weeks. Don’t put it off – if you rush your lists in the last couple of days they may not be as good as they could.

In other news, we had a spontaneous competition on the Top 10 Stephen King Books list. This list has now become the most commented on list on the site! The winners of the competition (who received a free book off the list each) were corinthian0430, and WinstonB – so congratulations to them.

3. Site Issues

You may have noticed that we have had some more issues lately with downtime. Now that we are running on two superpowered servers we have been able to diagnose the problem – WordPress. WordPress is the software we use to run this blog. When you look at a page here, WordPress has visited the database on another server, and stuck the page together with magical glue called HTML! This can be very intensive and it is leading to disaster. The solution? I am about to begin testing a new platform called Movable Type. If I am able to migrate all the users and articles I will seriously consider making the move.

If Movable Type works out, it will give us a new interface, a lot of new functionality, and global users – this means if you register here, you are already registered on the forums and site blog which will all have a uniform look. Another great thing about it is that the user profiles are all built in, allowing avatars (profile images) and allowing the users to contribute to the site via their own personal blogs – all of which would be hosted here. There are so many reasons to change – but we may lose some functionality. We will cross that bridge when we come to it, however.

Would you all be happy for us to make this move if it works out? The look and feel of the site will be entirely different as I can’t migrate the wordpress theme to Movable Type – so I will have to pick a new look. If we get to that point I may pick a couple and let you all choose.

If you are interested in reading more about Movable Type, you can read about it here. There is an excellent screencast on that page that demonstrates some of the features.