I am Matt Thomas.

Less Does More

April 17, 2006

Those of you with Baltimoronic inclinations might have noticed that we rolled out a major revision to Blogtimore, Hon over the weekend. We’ve nearly reached our goal for the first-ever Blogtimore Beg-a-thon and it seemed like this would be a good time to remind everyone of our commitment to the site—my significantly-southward new orientation notwithstanding.

The biggest changes are behind the scenes. The software that was previously chugging along behind the scenes, Lilina was great at the time, but shortly after we launched late last spring, development on the project ground to a halt. While some of its features were very interesting, it just wasn’t built to handle a blogroll the size of ours. Despite a few temporary hacks on our behalf to help it run more quickly, as we added more contributors to the site we were seeing delays of up to a minute for pageloads, which meant it finally had to go.

In its place we chose Planet. While the pickings are somewhat slim in the open-source-web-based-feed-aggregator category, Planet seems to be at the top of the pack. Despite a few glitches here and there, I’m happy with how it’s working so far. Adding feeds has been trimmed from a 5-hour to a five-second process, and the site itself is loading reasonably again.

We also nixed some features that seemed not to be adding much to the site. Organizing sites by neighborhood seemed like a great idea in the beginning, but as more and more sites signed up, I realized just to what extent Baltimore is a city of neighborhoods. We had nearly as many categories as we did actual feeds, and as sites would stop publishing, we found ourselves with multiple neighborhoods featuring one or fewer blogs. At the end of the day, Baltimore really is a big small town, and we don’t think it’s something that will be missed terribly much.

Favicons have also gone by the wayside. Again, it seemed like a good idea in the beginning, but the vast majority of users’ icons were either their CMS’ default icons or blank altogether. Planet allows us the possibility of adding custom avatars for each feed, something we’re strongly considering adding in the near future.

There’s also little things. An updated color scheme, hide/show links that actually work in Firefox and Safari (maybe our most-griped-about “feature”), and an updated layout courtesy of the brain trust at Position is Everything. While we still have a bit to sort out before the trains can run themselves again, all in all the updated Blogtimore is a welcome change that should see the community through even greater growth in the coming year.