State of the Munion '07

The Busy Busy Pixy Speech

My fellow Munuvians...

It's 2007! Yay!

"Why is this so exciting?", I hear you ask.

Well, let me begin with a quick recap of the last few months:

In October, we moved to our new servers, Akane and Nabiki, at our new hosting company, SoftLayer. I went on holiday, and came down with a cold and a horrible throat infection that laid me low for three weeks.

In November, the company I worked for was sold, and my job went away.

In December, I got another server, Ranma, located at LayeredTech, for off-site backups and experimenting. I also got a new job:

In January, I started working full-time on a commercial sister-site to mu.nu.

I've mentioned this before, but every time I said anything, something else came up to derail my plans. This time I've eliminated everything else, by conveniently not having anything else to do. And also having financial backing, which helps.

So here's the deal:

You get to keep your mu.nu site, just as it is, for as long as you want. Nothing changes there unless you want it to.

The blogging system I'm developing - it's called Minx - will be made available to mu.nu as well as to the new site. Eventually I hope to move everyone to it, as it is much much nicer than the version of Movable Type that we are stuck with, and indeed, much nicer than even the latest version of Movable Type.

In February, we will be launching a beta test of the new site. We'll be adding two more servers at SoftLayer - Ukyo and Shampoo - and signing up a whole bunch of beta testers.

The way we will do this is by handing out 1000 free "Express" accounts (normally $50 per year) through mu.nu. Every mu.nu blogger will get a number of invites to hand out however you want. The accounts are free for as long as people care to use them.

Also in February we'll have a mu.nu beta test of Minx for you to play with. You don't need to keep an invite for yourself, because you'll get all the same stuff (and more) here at mu.nu.

In March, 4-6 weeks after the beta starts, we'll be going to a limited commercial release. We'll be adding another server for the new site, Kodachi, and I'll also be adding a third server to run mu.nu, Kasumi.* These will most likely be running on Intel's new quad-core Xeons, which are very very fast.

From April onwards we will be expanding our commercial offering, adding more features and more servers. I'll also be expanding mu.nu, since by then we'll be past all our software problems and clear to grow.

In June I hope to replace Nabiki with a quad-core server, and in September to do the same with Akane. Depending on growth, I may be adding one or two more servers just for mu.nu.

By the end of the year I hope to have everyone moved off Movable Type and happily Minxing away. I'll be making the move as easy as I can; you'll be able to play around with Minx in a test environment, and then when you're ready, transfer all your posts from Movable Type to Minx in a few seconds. You will need to change your templates - Minx templates are completely different to Movable Type ones - but I'll be around to help out with that.

We will also be moving off CPanel, to Plesk. Plesk is a similar user-friendly control panel, but (I think) is nicer, better organised, and uses less resources on the server. It also has some useful features for managing large numbers of servers - and I fully intend to have a large number of servers by the end of this year. :)

You can play with a demo of Plesk here.

For existing users, the move to Plesk will probably come at the same time you move to Minx; though you will be able to run Minx under CPanel at least until I replace Akane around September.

So, what are the differences between mu.nu and the new site?

Well, mu.nu has a cool name. The new site has a cool name too, but I can't tell you what it is. I'm hoping I'll be able to tell you what it is by the time we actually launch...

mu.nu is free for users. It's my hobby, and I pay for it. Since I'll be using it as a sort of springboard to launch the commercial site, and the commercial site is what is paying my rent now, the work I put into it does benefit me financially, even if indirectly. So you can stop nagging me about that tip jar. ;)

With the new site, on the other hand, your account is either ad-supported or paid. The ads are unobtrusive and the pricing is as cheap as I can make it, but it's not free. It also has a system which lets other users support your site with donations; I don't know how that will work out, but it could be interesting.

Both the new site and mu.nu will have lots more things than blogs available to you. Forums, for one. Private messaging. Podcasts. Lots of stuff. And you can set it up any way you like. But disk space and bandwidth will be limited on the new site (depending on what package you choose), and essentially unlimited on mu.nu (depending on whether I can afford to feed you all...)

Of course, anyone will be able to sign up for the new site - once the beta test is over, anyway. mu.nu will remain invitation-only.

mu.nu will also have some power features that I won't be able to deliver on the commercial site: The Plesk control panel, unlimited email accounts, PHP, FTP access for uploading files, and probably more.

So all in all it looks like 2007 will be a very exciting year, and certainly much more fun that 2006. Don't go anywhere, folks, this is where it's all happening!

* Anime fans might be seeing a pattern here...

Posted by Pixy Misa at January 18, 2007 05:53 AM | TrackBack