Gawker Media to dump SixApart?

July 3, 2006

Lots of gossip and news about a big shake up at Gawker Media, including the sale of Sploid and Screenhead which I won’t recount here (if any one knows how or where Denton is selling the sites, let me know) but I did notice this at the tale end of the NY Times article:

For his part, Mr. Denton spends a lot more time reading computer code than blogs. He believes that the common software behind blogs isn’t up to the task and now has 11 people, including 4 in Hungary, working on developing proprietary solutions.

Yep, looks like Nick’s trying to create his own blogging software ala Jason Calacanis’ BlogSmith and will dump SixApart’s MovableType. I’d be interested to know why though?

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4 responses to Gawker Media to dump SixApart?

  1. David Krug July 3, 2006 at 7:46 pm

    Really I think its because MT doesn’t hold up well, and neither does wordpress to high traffic blogs. Even at 4k a day I’m worried about one of my new sites. The database starts acting funky and how is WP going to handle at 40k?

    I mean the BlogHerald ran alright with its readership but not great.

    I think someone could come out with a better properietary solution for high traffic blogs.

  2. duncan July 4, 2006 at 6:40 am

    The problem I found in terms of the backend was more from a hosting point, particularly with the Blog Herald, where as now we’ve had relatively few issues with WordPress, even at 20 million page views a month…and that’s only on 3 boxes! We know a lot more about hosting today than I did even 6 months ago, so I think it is scalable, however there is little doubt with either system that there is effeciencies that could be made.

  3. Anil July 6, 2006 at 5:50 am

    There’s sites larger than the individual Gawker ones (BusinessWeek, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Gothamist, etc.) running on MT, so it’s certainly not that MT can’t scale to run big sites.

  4. Sam Jackson July 11, 2006 at 1:24 am

    WP can be deadly to the sql backend if you aren’t careful–lazy plugins making too many calls, etc. Especially on new WP2 AJAX-ridden themes, it can be heady. But with careful optimization of the scripts you can do quite well. Optimize CSS by removing whitespace and comments, so forth and so on. You can shave off a lot of fat and it will be fine.