The Independent drops LiveJournal, goes with WordPress

[foxfirefey]

Why have we changed the blogs at independent.co.uk?
Why (and how) we’re changing commenting on independent.co.ukProbably the best thing for both sides--while LJ had a difficult time keeping up with the Independent's needs, I also know that Independent users were good at gumming up Support with awkward requests. Taking development in-house means

Comments

[matgb]

reading too much into the 'better than typepad' comment might be misleading. The old Indy blog was a half hearted effort that wasn't trying to use any features past the basics.

Think the biggest failure overall was the sacking of Gorman, who was still working on the backend code the day the redundancies came through. There were loads of tweaks he had in mind that would've helped whole site.

Definitely bad for future of site though, could've been a nice growth market for LJ if they'd got it right. A paying market too.

Possible politics influence, probably not major, new owner of Indy very anti Kremlin. Might have wanted to separate from SUP.

[fiddlingfrog]

There were loads of tweaks he had in mind that would've helped whole site.
Do you know what those might have been? I like playing whatif.

This also makes me wonder what other services LJ could be finagled into providing with a bit of front/backend massaging. Obviously journals and communities were the start, and so many of the recent changes seem geared towards the more serious blogger. As a commenting system for external comment LJ seems to have stumbled a bit but I bet that you could make a pretty decent forum setup with only a bit of work on the frontend.

Edit: Come to think of it, thinking about that text adventure I saw a few years back (which I can't find the link for), I wonder how hard it'd be to write an application that can help you in creating Choose-Your-Own-Adventure type fiction.

[matgb]

Well, the biggest one I can remember (ie the one I discussed with him and cared about) was sorting out domain mapping so that everyone can link a domain to their LJ properly.

Currently, if you map a domain, someone following a link/typing it in sees the logged out view (with navstrip showing as such), and all links link to the LJ address.

Which basically makes it a useless feature for most purposes. The Indy got thier mapped so that not only did links in display right, with internal links following through, but also if you typed in LJ user=whatever it would display whatever, but link to the actual domain, which was incredibly useful.

I'd have to dig into my inbox and look through loads of 18 month old conversations to figure others out, but there were lots of little tweaks, many of which were little annoyances.

And yes, LJ has pretty much stopped work, even at fixing things, knownissues still listed after more than a year is rally crap. Fortunately, DW is moving forward, and some of their stuff gets upstreamed into LJ, which is nice.

[intrepia]

If you're thinking of amagicalforest, a few of us made that for a Support privchange, and it's entirely coded into the journal's custom style.

[janinedog]

Huh, interesting. I agree that it's probably for the best. Though losing that huge partnership can't be good for LJ...I guess they're giving up on that market now.

[foxfirefey]

There's no way for me to know or estimate how much the partnership made, as opposed to the costs of keeping it running, so it's really hard to speculate in that direction. But, considering the comments about spam from the Independent, I wonder if some of LJ's major spam-curbing attempts were inspired by feedback from The Independent.

[matgb]

I'm pretty much sure of this, especially given they imported a huge chunk of stuff into LJ so that archive pages could get comments.

I can recall seeing stuff, and Jimmy used to be good at talking issues before he jumped back to a Govt job (which I must've missed the announcement of).

[intrepia]

Very interesting! From the perspective of a Support volunteer, I think this is terrific news, but I don't really have the insights into how profitable of a partnership it was to know whether this is good for LiveJournal or not.