Out of town; Site Updates

Guest posters
I will be traveling on business Thursday through Sunday. I am happy to announce that the site will be in good hands during my absence: both Billmon and Steve Gilliard will be covering for me, so expect a blogging tour de force these next four days.

I am so swamped that I already don't answer about 80 percent of the email I get (and I am honestly guilt-ridden over it). Over these next four days I won't even have access to my Daily Kos email account, so don't expect any response, no matter how urgent or important your message may be.

Site Port to Slash
I found out last week that Movable Type -- the software powering dKos -- is not designed to handle this amount of traffic. The message boards, in particular, have become a drag on performance and a real nightmare to maintain. The number of Freeper trolls has skyrocketed, malicious posters are impersonating longtime members, a 300-post thread is difficult to read, etc.

So I will be porting the site over to Slash -- the engine behind Slashdot.org and Plastic (among others). The front end will look the same as always, but the message boards will be far more powerful -- with moderator tools (so the dKos community can help keep the peace), "karma" rankings to help identify the most respected or funny posters, and the ability to easily evict trolls before they can cause too much damage.

Links Directory
I know I offend lots of my fellow bloggers by maintaining a small, highly selective blogroll (i.e. list of links). I've always considered long blogrolls user unfriendly, so I've kept mine short and simple to help provide value to my readers (I mean, does anyone find Instapundit's eternal list of links useful?).

But, I do want to help promote my blog neighbors best I can. So, I am putting the finishing touches on an automated Yahoo-style links directory. I'll try to wrap it up within the next two weeks and open it up to the blog community for submissions. It won't be a homepage link, but should still have good value given my high traffic levels.

Donations
My hosting costs have increased six-fold thanks to the site's rapid growth, while I've had to hire technical expertise to help with the port to Slash and the links directory. None of this would have been possible without the generous donations from many of you in the dKos community. I can't thank you enough. I can't wait to unveil all of the new site improvements!

Draft Clark
This is a pretty exciting project, and I hope to have it running (at least in Beta version) late next week. I'll have a lot to say about my reasoning behind the effort throughout next week, so stay tuned.

Posted April 03, 2003 12:00 AM | Comments (19)