6 ms·

They lost a simple interface designed to edit blog posts and now their marketing team has to use the Github interface and learn Markdown. They lost the comment

They lost a simple interface designed to edit blog posts and now their marketing team has to use the Github interface and learn Markdown. They lost the comment system and had to move the data to an external provider, which instantly bit them. They had to write Python scripts to munge the data. But now they have the performance of static html. I guess just changing two lines in the nginx configuration did not came to mind. I think this was a very poor investment and will never pay off.

swasheck 11y ago
i dislike wordpress quite a bit, but i also agree that this was a head-scratching investment.
toast0 11y ago
Last year, I took two days to build a mostly static blog to replace WordPress. It pays off everytime there is a WordPress vulnerability I don't have to worry about, and everytime we post an interesting post and I don't have to worry about if WordPress is going to fall over (yes, maybe there's some caching thing we could have used). It pays off when I have multiple data centers running, because WordPress doesn't have the ability to read from a local MySQL slave, so perf on the datacenter far from the master is terrible (the i18n plugin we were using didn't help). I imagine the payoff is similar for the stack overflow team as well. EDIT: I don't understand why they are using disqus for comments, when they have a self hosted comment platform, in my case we don't accept comments.
- hueving 11y ago
  Simple caching would have solved all of your issues. Classic case of not profiling before blaming the whole system.
  - toast0 11y ago
    Simple caching wouldn't have solved the (numerous) security issues.
    - wink 11y ago
      You could still export/dump the WordPress pages as static html and still keep the editor. (and WordPress not accessible from the outside).
tsurantino 11y ago
Asana did something similar: https://eng.asana.com/2014/02/scaling-asana-com/ https://eng.asana.com/2014/02/scaling-asana-com/ There is an argument to be made that a ubiquitous, developer-first system translates into more instant changes. Seeing changes quickly makes it easier to iterate, which is better over time than the initial investment to learn Markdown.
smoser 11y ago
The marketing team can use http://prose.io http://prose.io without learning Markdown. Using using an external comment provider promotes some popular users to comment such as Grimlock whom otherwise wouldn't.
- jonhmchan 11y ago
  Someone else also mentioned prose.io - something I didn't come across when building this. Going to explore.
alexa_scordato 11y ago
Hi! I'm the Director of Product Marketing at Stack Exchange. It might sound like more work for us to use Github and markdown, but I see it as a huge plus. For non technical employees, this is a great opportunity to learn a new skill and collaborate with the engineering organization. Jon trained a few of us already... so far, so good!
- allendoerfer 11y ago
  Hi! While the change surely was not a huge investment I just do not believe that the benefits justify the costs. Since you wrote a blog post about it, I felt free to question your decisions. Nevertheless, now that it is done, I hope the new system works well for you. Maybe your team gets used to git for version control in other areas of work, too, which would be a huge win and ultimately prove me wrong ;-)
  - alexa_scordato 11y ago
    I hope it works well too! Maybe I'll write a follow-up blog post in a few months and report back on our progress. In general, I think that marketers today should acquire some basic front-end knowledge and that knowing git and markdown is a good step towards getting there. Coding things like email templates and landing pages without the help of a designer or developer will be huge for us.
    - mattmanser 11y ago
      You will never be able to code email templates and that just shows how clueless you are as to the rabbit hole your devs have got you in to. Email markup is so arcane and complex at the moment that one mistake by your non-technical team will mean hours of pain. I know you want to support your colleagues, but they have made a bad decision which will make your job less doing the things you are good at and more dealing with things that should never have been your problem.
      - jc4p 11y ago
fsk 11y ago
My employer originally had a Wordpress-based blogging product. They spent more than $2M writing their own blogging system, and it still was missing many features that come with Wordpress. They ditched it and switched back to Wordpress.
- jlangenauer 11y ago
  TWO MILLION DOLLARS on a blogging system. I'm speechless.
  - morgante 11y ago
    It might surprise you even more to know that the creators of the most popular blogging system have raise $317M.
  - hueving 11y ago
    10 silicon Valley software engineers on something goes through 2 million in under a year when you consider total cost of employment.
    - jon-wood 11y ago
      If it takes 10 engineers a year to build a blog then something is very wrong.
      - rokhayakebe 11y ago
        I would like to see a study where one would give the same project with a solid deadline to three different teams of 3, 15, 30 engineers and see how long it takes each them to finish it.
jonhmchan 11y ago
I'm the author of the post and the lead on this project. Many of the costs you mention aren't so bad. As mentioned earlier, we actually consider learning GH and Markdown a plus for non-devs. As for comments and writing Python, some pain here, but were ultimately solvable. Performance also wasn't the only plus here. Closing major security holes, making more of our content and technology more open, and moving to a platform that our devs liked working in are just some of the other wins. It's too early to say definitively now, but we think the change is probably a good one.
- clumsysmurf 11y ago
  Did anyone evaluate ghost? If so, I'm curious what the verdict was. https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/
  - jc4p 11y ago
    We did consider Ghost, I love it and it would've given us uploading images to S3 for free, but static files and being able to use any markdown editor you want won over.
- rquirk 11y ago
  You haven't broken the podcast RSS feed, thank you. Another large podcast network recently did a redesign and broke all of their feeds, apparently on purpose. Crazy. However, the podcast feed is impossible to find now if you didn't have it before. Previously I think it was on every podcast post as an RSS link. Now the individual tag RSS links all point to the main feed, rather than to a per-tag feed. e.g. http://blog.stackoverflow.com/category/podcasts/feed/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/category/podcasts/feed/ still works if you know it, but going to https://blog.stackexchange.com/tags/podcasts/ https://blog.stackexchange.com/tags/podcasts/ gives you an RSS link to just "/feed/". This is probably not a good place for bug reports :-S
nnq 11y ago
They've also lost COMPLEXITY, and this always pays off, even if in roundabout ways that you cannot measure, and even if it's only for the positive effects on the mental-health of the engineers working on this! Really... modern WordPress is a very complicated beast and keeping all sorts of details about how you need to optimize it, server, caching, db in you head is just no worth it. Yeah, "changing two lines in the nginx configuration" could have worked, but imho simply the cost of keeping in your head the information about what two lines to change is just too large. As it grows, it simply drives you insane by how many technical trivialities you need to keep in your head to keep it working smoothly, when you could instead use that brainpower so solve the really interesting problems. An the fact that "their marketing team has to use the Github interface and learn Markdown" is also a hidden benefit, if you think about all the subtle frontend bugs that happen when somebody uses the WYSIWYG editor of WP and they end up with a combination of styles that breaks the layout. For any project above a certain size, the "dumb WIM" (What I Mean) interface of Markdown always trumps the WYSIWYG. Also, the benefit of mostly NOT HAVING TO THINK ABOUT SECURITY AT ALL is freaking HUGE! Developers can simply say "it's the server guys' problem" now. Forget about having to manually audit the code of 3rd party plugins if you really care about security. And forget about updating and realizing something breaks and you have to fix it. For any fast growing company, keep this in mind: REDUCE COMPLEXITY. ALWAYS. NO MATTER HOW LARGE THE SHORT TERM COST.
- pp19dd 11y ago
  Just as an aside to WordPress optimization, so there are two ways to do that. One of them is to analyze content flow (how often are things updated) and traffic flow and then come up with a reasonable strategy. Things like use memcaching for sidebars, separate those out depending whether you need to, then work on caching plugins. The caching plugins need work because they tend to be programmed to allow robots to spider uncached content, which makes no sense to me. Robot traffic on high volume sites is just insane. With a hundred blogs or so on a multisite installation you could easily spend a month doing postmortems and hunting down the least common denominator (oh hello switch_to_blog, why do you use 36 MB of RAM on each call?) Or, you can slap some ram sticks in the machine, install varnish-cache, write a few rules for it and go play minecraft the other 29 days.
- 11y ago
fabian2k 11y ago
Stack Exchange uses Markdown for everything on their Q&A sites already. If they expect their users to be able to use it, I think they can expect the same from their employees. It's likely not a wasted effort to learn it as they might need it somewhere else as well. The Stack Exchange blog was hacked a few years ago, I suspect that was part of the motivation to switch to something they know better.

swasheck 11y ago

i dislike wordpress quite a bit, but i also agree that this was a head-scratching investment.

toast0 11y ago

Last year, I took two days to build a mostly static blog to replace WordPress. It pays off everytime there is a WordPress vulnerability I don't have to worry about, and everytime we post an interesting post and I don't have to worry about if WordPress is going to fall over (yes, maybe there's some caching thing we could have used). It pays off when I have multiple data centers running, because WordPress doesn't have the ability to read from a local MySQL slave, so perf on the datacenter far from the master is terrible (the i18n plugin we were using didn't help). I imagine the payoff is similar for the stack overflow team as well. EDIT: I don't understand why they are using disqus for comments, when they have a self hosted comment platform, in my case we don't accept comments.

hueving 11y ago
Simple caching would have solved all of your issues. Classic case of not profiling before blaming the whole system.
- toast0 11y ago
  Simple caching wouldn't have solved the (numerous) security issues.
  - wink 11y ago
    You could still export/dump the WordPress pages as static html and still keep the editor. (and WordPress not accessible from the outside).

tsurantino 11y ago

Asana did something similar: https://eng.asana.com/2014/02/scaling-asana-com/ https://eng.asana.com/2014/02/scaling-asana-com/ There is an argument to be made that a ubiquitous, developer-first system translates into more instant changes. Seeing changes quickly makes it easier to iterate, which is better over time than the initial investment to learn Markdown.

smoser 11y ago

The marketing team can use http://prose.io http://prose.io without learning Markdown. Using using an external comment provider promotes some popular users to comment such as Grimlock whom otherwise wouldn't.

jonhmchan 11y ago
Someone else also mentioned prose.io - something I didn't come across when building this. Going to explore.

alexa_scordato 11y ago

Hi! I'm the Director of Product Marketing at Stack Exchange. It might sound like more work for us to use Github and markdown, but I see it as a huge plus. For non technical employees, this is a great opportunity to learn a new skill and collaborate with the engineering organization. Jon trained a few of us already... so far, so good!

allendoerfer 11y ago
Hi! While the change surely was not a huge investment I just do not believe that the benefits justify the costs. Since you wrote a blog post about it, I felt free to question your decisions. Nevertheless, now that it is done, I hope the new system works well for you. Maybe your team gets used to git for version control in other areas of work, too, which would be a huge win and ultimately prove me wrong ;-)
- alexa_scordato 11y ago
  I hope it works well too! Maybe I'll write a follow-up blog post in a few months and report back on our progress. In general, I think that marketers today should acquire some basic front-end knowledge and that knowing git and markdown is a good step towards getting there. Coding things like email templates and landing pages without the help of a designer or developer will be huge for us.
  - mattmanser 11y ago
    You will never be able to code email templates and that just shows how clueless you are as to the rabbit hole your devs have got you in to. Email markup is so arcane and complex at the moment that one mistake by your non-technical team will mean hours of pain. I know you want to support your colleagues, but they have made a bad decision which will make your job less doing the things you are good at and more dealing with things that should never have been your problem.
    - jc4p 11y ago

fsk 11y ago

My employer originally had a Wordpress-based blogging product. They spent more than $2M writing their own blogging system, and it still was missing many features that come with Wordpress. They ditched it and switched back to Wordpress.

jlangenauer 11y ago
TWO MILLION DOLLARS on a blogging system. I'm speechless.
- morgante 11y ago
  It might surprise you even more to know that the creators of the most popular blogging system have raise $317M.
- hueving 11y ago
  10 silicon Valley software engineers on something goes through 2 million in under a year when you consider total cost of employment.
  - jon-wood 11y ago
    If it takes 10 engineers a year to build a blog then something is very wrong.
    - rokhayakebe 11y ago
      I would like to see a study where one would give the same project with a solid deadline to three different teams of 3, 15, 30 engineers and see how long it takes each them to finish it.

jonhmchan 11y ago

I'm the author of the post and the lead on this project. Many of the costs you mention aren't so bad. As mentioned earlier, we actually consider learning GH and Markdown a plus for non-devs. As for comments and writing Python, some pain here, but were ultimately solvable. Performance also wasn't the only plus here. Closing major security holes, making more of our content and technology more open, and moving to a platform that our devs liked working in are just some of the other wins. It's too early to say definitively now, but we think the change is probably a good one.

clumsysmurf 11y ago
Did anyone evaluate ghost? If so, I'm curious what the verdict was. https://ghost.org/ https://ghost.org/
- jc4p 11y ago
  We did consider Ghost, I love it and it would've given us uploading images to S3 for free, but static files and being able to use any markdown editor you want won over.
rquirk 11y ago
You haven't broken the podcast RSS feed, thank you. Another large podcast network recently did a redesign and broke all of their feeds, apparently on purpose. Crazy. However, the podcast feed is impossible to find now if you didn't have it before. Previously I think it was on every podcast post as an RSS link. Now the individual tag RSS links all point to the main feed, rather than to a per-tag feed. e.g. http://blog.stackoverflow.com/category/podcasts/feed/ http://blog.stackoverflow.com/category/podcasts/feed/ still works if you know it, but going to https://blog.stackexchange.com/tags/podcasts/ https://blog.stackexchange.com/tags/podcasts/ gives you an RSS link to just "/feed/". This is probably not a good place for bug reports :-S

nnq 11y ago

They've also lost COMPLEXITY, and this always pays off, even if in roundabout ways that you cannot measure, and even if it's only for the positive effects on the mental-health of the engineers working on this! Really... modern WordPress is a very complicated beast and keeping all sorts of details about how you need to optimize it, server, caching, db in you head is just no worth it. Yeah, "changing two lines in the nginx configuration" could have worked, but imho simply the cost of keeping in your head the information about what two lines to change is just too large. As it grows, it simply drives you insane by how many technical trivialities you need to keep in your head to keep it working smoothly, when you could instead use that brainpower so solve the really interesting problems. An the fact that "their marketing team has to use the Github interface and learn Markdown" is also a hidden benefit, if you think about all the subtle frontend bugs that happen when somebody uses the WYSIWYG editor of WP and they end up with a combination of styles that breaks the layout. For any project above a certain size, the "dumb WIM" (What I Mean) interface of Markdown always trumps the WYSIWYG. Also, the benefit of mostly NOT HAVING TO THINK ABOUT SECURITY AT ALL is freaking HUGE! Developers can simply say "it's the server guys' problem" now. Forget about having to manually audit the code of 3rd party plugins if you really care about security. And forget about updating and realizing something breaks and you have to fix it. For any fast growing company, keep this in mind: REDUCE COMPLEXITY. ALWAYS. NO MATTER HOW LARGE THE SHORT TERM COST.

pp19dd 11y ago
Just as an aside to WordPress optimization, so there are two ways to do that. One of them is to analyze content flow (how often are things updated) and traffic flow and then come up with a reasonable strategy. Things like use memcaching for sidebars, separate those out depending whether you need to, then work on caching plugins. The caching plugins need work because they tend to be programmed to allow robots to spider uncached content, which makes no sense to me. Robot traffic on high volume sites is just insane. With a hundred blogs or so on a multisite installation you could easily spend a month doing postmortems and hunting down the least common denominator (oh hello switch_to_blog, why do you use 36 MB of RAM on each call?) Or, you can slap some ram sticks in the machine, install varnish-cache, write a few rules for it and go play minecraft the other 29 days.
11y ago

fabian2k 11y ago

Stack Exchange uses Markdown for everything on their Q&A sites already. If they expect their users to be able to use it, I think they can expect the same from their employees. It's likely not a wasted effort to learn it as they might need it somewhere else as well. The Stack Exchange blog was hacked a few years ago, I suspect that was part of the motivation to switch to something they know better.