blogging.wurk.net

As you might have noticed, wurk.net is proudly powered by Wordpress. But it wasn’t always that way. Once upon a time (well, a couple of weeks ago), before we got huge (ok, before we reached double figures in our Feedburner feedcount), it was ‘powered’ by Typepad.

We’d launched 5 blogs on a Typepad Professional package which costs around USD$12 a month. And it was tough going, I tell you. Tough. Considering that there are now almost 30 wurk.net blogs in the pipeline, and probably more to come, it’s a damn good job that we switched when we did.

And here’s why…

Typepad is a powerful service for running individual blogs, make no mistake. It could even be a great service for running a network of blogs, if they were the ‘right’ kind of blogs, ie completely unbranded generically, with their own design, own stylesheets, and own content. However, things start going down the tubes when you need each of those blogs to maintain a good amount of generic branding. And it gets worse if you’re constantly tweaking that branding, and want to be consistent across every single one of the sites in the network.

One of the issues with Typepad is that it doesn’t support any kind of server-side scripting in your templates (templates being the pages of code that hold the design for your blog). So, you can’t use PHP or ASP to do anything clever with your blog, like applying one generic template to all of your blogs - which, of course, is what I needed to do. Another issue I had with Typepad is that there is no FTP access to your templates on their server. I don’t know about the logistics/security issues in providing this, but it would certainly have helped a lot. Instead of FTP, updating a template either meant editing code in a textarea on your Typepad control panel and hitting save, or cutting and pasting the whole lot out of the textarea, editing the code, then cutting and pasting it all back in. Then hitting save.

Now imagine that your template had, say, ten separate files - a header.html, a footer.html, a sidebar.html, an archive.html, and a style.css, etc, etc, etc… and that you needed to make a minor change to each. You’ll be arsing around making changes in textareas to around 50 files.

But then imagine that you need to makes those changes to all 5 sites in your network. That’s 5 x 5 x 10 files you’re gonna be editing. Oh, just 250 files. In a textarea. Nice.

Can you believe the amount of work you’d have if you wanted to make a change to 30 blogs?

However, Typepad does provide a way around this. You’re able to store a set of templates, and call it a ‘master’ template set, or something else that’s relevant. You can apply this template to as many of your blogs as you want. But I found two problems with this. Firstly, whenever you updated any part of that template set (via the textarea, of course), you need to republish each of the blogs that use that particular template. Republishing 30 blogs, each containing hundreds, if not thousands, of entries is gonna take some time. The second problem is that if you’re sharing a master template set between blogs, each of those blogs is gonna look identical. Plus, even if you are running a tightly-branded network, there’ll be some parts (text or colour changes) that will vary between blogs. And, in my case, I needed to be able to dynamically change Google Adsense IDs, depending on who had written each post. Tthere’s no way around issues like these without some server-side scripting.

Oh, hang on… you can’t use server side scripting.

No restrictions on client-side, though. Enter Javascript. To make it all work, I had no option but to call a set of javascript files from my own server. I used javascript to dynamically insert the right Adsense ID for each author. I used javascript to include blog-specific text. I used javascript to include network-wide news. I used javascript to include the right CSS file for each blog. I used javascript to include RSS feeds. And I used javascript to do all kinds of other stuff that I really wanted to be able to do server side. I had no choice.

It meant mirroring the [folder] structure of the network on my own server, using folders that were named after the title of the Typepad blogs, so each blog would call the right javascript from the right place - the title of the blog was the only constant ‘variable’ that you could pull out of each blog using Typepad/MT Tags. It was a mess. As you can imagine. And a logistical nightmare for just 5 blogs. Imagine 30.

So last week I gave Wordpress a try. Fair enough, each blog currently needs its own install of Wordpress - this, I’m told will change. But that’s the only gripe I have. I’ve created a single generic Wordpress theme that’s quickly and easily updated locally in a text editor, and quickly and easily uploaded via FTP to my own server. If i want to run those updates across the network instantly, no problem. It’s just a case of overwriting each blog’s theme folder with the new master folder (all with version numbers, so I know immediately which blog is using which version of the theme) - again all over FTP, and all in seconds. No time-consuming republishing, either - Wordpress dynamically generates each page, and creates a static URL using Apache’s mod-rewrite. Excellent.

I can now add new Adsense IDs for new bloggers instantly, and give all bloggers much more control over how they post entries and manage their blog. What’s more, individual site colours, bespoke text and other site-specific content aren’t affected, either. Because along with the master theme folder that’s identical for each blog, I use another folder that holds all the specific stuff for each blog (header image, colours, etc). And it’s all put together by one server using PHP, which means there’s no waiting around for external scripts to call, and no ‘desperately hoping it’s all gonna hold together’ every time I load a page.

And it really is a damn site easier to manage, too. Sorry, Typepad.

Update: Wow… this post has received quite a lot of attention, so I’ve written short follow-ups on this subject here and here.