What’s New for The Subspace Cafe

Written by Dan Carlson • @minutiaeman@tenforward.social

Published July 5, 2004

You may have noticed some slight changes to the appearance of The Subspace Cafe today. Or, if you were stopping by early this morning, you might have caught a glimpse of the site in its rough, default-colored appearance. Yes, I couldn’t resist fiddling with a good thing, and decided to take some time to convert the Cafe to use a different blogging application. Although Simplog (the previous software) was pretty good at what it did and was a great way for me to get my feet wet in the world of blogging, it really doesn’t have all of the features that I’m looking for. (I’d definitely still recommend using it if you’re just starting out, though. It’s good for familiarizing yourself with the basics of running your own application.)

Now, The Subspace Cafe uses Movable Type 3.0, a more complex and robust blogging engine that offers a wider range of options, not the least of which is static HTML pages that are automatically generated when a new article is submitted. This makes the entire site much more attractive to search engines (especially Google).

Some of the major changes with Movable Type include:

• Karma. MT doesn’t offer anything like the karma voting offered with Simplog. However, I don’t feel this is a major loss, because it seemed as if not many people were actually clicking through the links anyway.
• Comments. Although MT does support comments attached to individual articles, I’ve chosen to disable them in favor of a much more sophisticated feature — Infopop’s instant topic links, which can be generated alongside the articles themselves and link to a unique topic at the Subspace Comms Network. If no topic associated with the article exists yet, then you are instead prompted to start a discussion yourself. Slick, no?
• Syndication. Simplog did support RSS 0.91 summaries that were generated, but MT gives much more flexibility: you can choose from RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, or Atom 0.3 syndication feeds.
• Trackbacks. I don’t anticipate this becoming a major feature, but I thought that it might be useful and could eventually help generate some additional traffic for both my site and anyone else’s.

If you’ve got any comments, suggestions, or complaints, just click the “Comments” button below and let me know what you think!