State of the Munion

Hi everyone! Welcome to my first biquadrennial State of the Munion Address.

In the past eight months, we have grown from a small community of thirty blogs and a forum sending out thirty gigabytes a month, to a not-so-small community of over a hundred blogs and three forums sending out two hundred gigabytes a month. Opening our doors in April was such a huge success that I haven't entirely recovered from it yet.

Moving forward, I plan to offer three new options to Munuvian bloggers:

First, Movable Type 3.1, which is expected to be released as early as this week. This offers a few nice new features such as dynamic page generation and scheduled posting (like Trickle), and comes with several neat plugins as standard, including the new MT Blacklist and a cross-blog posting thingy. MT's new pricing means that this will only cost us $100 for the whole of MuNu.

Second, Expression Engine 1.1. Thanks to the generosity of the people at PMachine, we have a free unlimited user license, and I'll be providing this as an option. Expression Engine is fully dynamic, which makes posting and commenting faster than with MT, but page generation slightly slower. It's a more flexible and general-purpose package that should please some of our power-bloggers.

Third, I have installed a blogging package in the MuNu forum system. The advantage of this is that it is tightly integrated with the forums - and also that users can create blogs themselves without my intervention. The disadvantages are that it isn't as flexible as MT or EE, and it doesn't directly support individual domains. I don't expect any of the existing bloggers to use it (though you are welcome to try it out), but some of the forum Munuvians have expressed interest.

All of these options will be available within the next couple of weeks (assuming MT 3.1 is released on schedule). However, no-one is required to move at all - I'll keep MT 2.6 up and running until nobody wants it any more.

Exactly how we move is still up in the air. I'll start by setting up two test systems so that people can play around a bit. One of the issues is maintaining permalinks; I'm not sure how this is going to work. We have probably the biggest and most complicated MT installation in the world, so it might take a bit of fiddling.

I'm pretty sure I can maintain an integrated "New at MuNu" list. Certainly this can be done between MT 2.6 and 3.1; I'll need to play around with EE a bit to make sure of that as well.

As some of you have already noticed, I've been doing a lot of work over the past few weeks on the forum side of MuNu. I've installed a new package, MX-System, which integrates closely with the forum software, phpBB, and provides a lot of new functionality. Cribbing from my post on the forums, I've added the following goodies already:

Cash
Attachments
Photo album
Music
Games
Portal
Shoutbox
Basic chat
Enhanced site statistics
RSS Feeds
HTML entities ∀ℑŠ‡‰€

(That last is something that should work but is broken in the forum software.)

And I have the following goodies installed and in testing:

Pets
Shops
Lottery
Bank
Stock market
Staff list
Calendar
Meetings
News
Blogs
Knowledge base
Mods database (this is just a little thingy that tells you what goodies I've installed)
Web links
Downloads

And there are even more features that I'm investigating.

Because it's so flexible, I've decided to use it as the system for the MuNu home page. Try it out, particularly if you're not an Internet Explorer victim. (Due to a long-standing bug, IE does not like MuNu cookies. This doesn't affect MuNu subdomains, just the main MuNu domain itself. I'm trying to work around this, but haven't quite solved the problem yet.)

As you can see, the main page provides links to all the MuNu blogs and forums. Over time, I'd like to drive traffic to the MuNu portal and then out to all the munuvian sites. I've got various ideas on how to do this, including a regular Carnival of the Munuvians, which I'd like to start next week. (This week is my busy week at work.) Email me by next Monday with your best recent post, and I'll feature you all on the MuNu home page. I'm not sure yet how often we'll run it, but we'll try it and see.

Beyond that... Well, as I mentioned, we are now generating 200GB of traffic a month; easily a couple of million pages. (I tried to track this with a MuNu counter but it choked and died.) This is 40% of our available monthly bandwidth, so we have room to grow for a few more months. I'm looking at migrating us to a bigger and more powerful server with more bandwidth, but naturally this will cost more. Fortunately, prices are coming down all the time, so by the time we really need it it might not cost much more at all. I'm keeping an eye on pricing; I'd like to stay with out current hosting provider if I can get a good deal.

From next week I should be more available for setting up new Munuvians, so if people would like to get the ball rolling again in Ellis Island, I'll be along shortly. It's great to see people actually seeking us out and asking to become Munuvians, and it reflects well on all of you. Even Harvey.

Oh, and the t-shirts should be ready sometime around Christmas...

Posted by Pixy Misa at August 30, 2004 04:52 AM