Chris Berry

Laura Scott, President of pingVision LLC is a graphic and interactive media designer with a background in print production, television and web. On the eve of the 2006 BlogHer conference and just after upgrading the BlogHer site I posed some questions to Laura and she has provided some great insight. This interview discusses a little about Laura, Drupal and her work with the BlogHer community site.

This is the third part of the interview. Part 1 and Part 2 are also here on Performancing. If you’d like clarification from Laura on any of the points feel free to ask them in the comments and Laura and I will do our best to get you an answer.

As to why this part is so much shorter – just blame my inability to divide properly… 😉

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What features in the next Drupal release seem exciting to you?

You mean in terms of the next major release around the end of this year? Well, the improvements in caching and query structures being discussed right now on the development list are quite exciting. Drupal’s power can come at a cost in terms of demand upon the server, not so much in the basic core but when you start adding the additional modules and functionality that most websites need these days. It will be great when the code is made even more scalable, so that we can build more complexity on the same hardware.

But most interesting to me are the continued developments in the theming system. Right now, there’s a lot in a Drupal page that is pre-formatted by the system itself — especially in some of the contributed modules. As a designer, that has driven me crazy more than once. I’m most interested in the changes planned to move this all into the theming, so that what you see is totally governed by the theme and the theme calls up the data in a way that is best for that particular site. We’re still limited by web standards and all the various ugly hacks you have to do to make websites work in Internet Explorer, but there’s still a lot we can do.

I’m also loving the new contributions in the rich media area. With the spread of broadband and the newer video codecs available, you can get some pretty high quality video on websites, even in Flash. And same for the music world. We’re just finishing development on a grassroots independent music community site that would not have been possible on that budget just six months ago.

And all this is changing everything. It’s an insurgent economy being born, and Drupal is right there in the thick of it. It’s great! Really, I’m just glad Drupal is there with such a great community of developers. I take the surprises and API changes as a given, just part of the price of working with free open source software. But considering that nearly all these changes end up making Drupal even better, I can’t complain. I’m hoping that once we get staffed up we’ll have more time to contribute to the community effort. Right now, it’s just one website after another — but that’s great, because they’re all really interesting projects that take us into different directions.

Laura Scott, President of pingVision LLC is a graphic and interactive media designer with a background in print production, television and web. On the eve of the 2006 BlogHer conference and just after upgrading the BlogHer site I posed some questions to Laura and she has provided some great insight. This interview discusses a little about Laura, Drupal and her work with the BlogHer community site.

This is the first in what will be a multi-part interview. If you’d like clarification from Laura on any of the points feel free to ask them in the comments and Laura and I will do our best to get you an answer.

When did you start using Drupal?

I first tried Drupal in 2004. I’d been playing around with blogs for a couple of years, off and on, which was really just sort of a distraction thing. It was just interesting, this idea of sharing an online journal. But I’d been doing basic “1.0”-type websites since 1995 or so it wasn’t long before I got frustrated trying to modify Blogger templates and wanted to start building something of my own using one of the open source content management systems. So I started researching them, looking at the software behind some of the big sites. From what I remember, I looked at Mambo, TikiWiki, Slashcode, Scoop and Plone. I wanted to get into something more robust than the simpler blogging systems, and the various Nukes, which were still popular, were reeling from some disastrous security issues not long before.

Drupal was on the list from the early going, mainly based on its reputation for being well coded. I crossed off TikiWiki because I was just baffled by it. Slashcode was interesting because they had perl and php versions, but I never tried it out. Scoop had much appeal because I liked the power Kuro5hin displayed, and some big sites with a lot of activity were using it, but for some reason I never tried installing it and running it. I wasn’t much of a perl coder — I’m still not, more on the llama level, if that — and I was also having trouble finding hosts that allowed mod_perl.

In the end, the short list included Drupal, Mambo and Plone. Plone was very appealing because of its power. I wanted to be able to do just about anything with the CMS, and Plone seemed to fall into that category. But Python setups are rare with hosts, and Plone’s reputation was that it had a very steep learning curve. So I set Plone aside, and tried out Mambo. Mambo had a lot of pizzazz, with some pretty themes and what, at first, seemed like an easy setup procedure. But once it was up, I found it to be very stiff — it was very hard to do anything outside of its rigid system. The typical Mambo setup was easy, but to make variants proved to be very hard, at least to me. I just didn’t “get” it. And I didn’t really feel all that comfortable with its licensing, which seemed open but had this proprietary aspect that kind of scared me away.

But with Drupal, while the learning curve wasn’t all that gentle, it just seemed to make more sense to me than the other CMSs. I got some php books and basically lived on the forums for many months, asking dumb questions and then starting to answer others’ questions. And the more I learned, the more excited I got about Drupal.

Can you give a quick overview of the history of pingVision and where you spend most of your time these days – on Drupal or DVD work or both?

I’ve worked a lot of freelance in the video realm. In fact, there are very few people who have established “jobs” in video, film and television. Most of us had to work freelance. So I guess I got entrepreneurial by necessity, and that can get you looking down the line, into the future and where the media industry (in a general sense) is going. That took me into DVD work and streaming video for the web and designing user interfaces to present that video.

It’s all changing so rapidly. Right now we have the internet, which has limited bandwidth for most of us — too limited for truly rich media applications — and we have cable and dish television, with their clunky interfaces and kludgy attempts at view on demand. And we have DVDs, which really are simple interactive presentations of rich media, all burned to a disc because the internet can’t handle that bandwidth.

But that’s going to change. There’s a convergence coming in just a few years, when what we know as “television” and what we know as “the internet” will become one thing, or maybe two very similar things: truly interactive television, or maybe it will be more like a truly fat broadband multimedia web. And unless Congress does something to undermine the neutrality of access to this interactive content, I feel it will be a really interesting cultural paradigm shift, truly getting away from the hit-driven economy (though that will always be there to some extent) and more into the long tail of fabulous, “undiscovered” talent, be it in entertainment like movies or in gaming or in journalism or in ways we can’t even predict right now. That prospect has fascinated me since forever. I have a felling this could represent an economic boom as well — a real boom, not a bubble.

So to answer your question, pingVision happened kind of gradually, almost spontaneous on its own. As I was getting better at Drupal, people started asking me to help them out on their sites. So in my freelance work, I started doing both websites and video-based projects — on both sides of the media realms that are converging. And THAT is way way too big for me to do alone. I always wanted to build a company, a collaborative organization that nurtures creativity and helps it flourish. Now seems to be a chance to do that. So here we are, just getting started, probably with a better sense of where we’ll be in five years than in five months. I’m just glad people are liking our work.

I noticed you’re hiring a PHP/Drupal Developer – business must be good. How is the candidate search going?

We’re hiring our first developer and are very excited. We aren’t ready to announce it yet, but it will be soon on our website. We had a number of very strong applicants, and we might be looking to hire them, too, as we scale up. The short-term plan is to build to five people. Then we’ll revisit things and see where demand may take us.

Laura Scott, President of pingVision LLC is a graphic and interactive media designer with a background in print production, television and web. On the eve of the 2006 BlogHer conference and just after upgrading the BlogHer site I posed some questions to Laura and she has provided some great insight. This interview discusses a little about Laura, Drupal and her work with the BlogHer community site.

This is the second part of the interview. Part 1 is also here on Performancing. If you’d like clarification from Laura on any of the points feel free to ask them in the comments and Laura and I will do our best to get you an answer.

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How did you get involved with BlogHer?

You may or may not have heard about all the hoopla that happened last year when some major bloggers basically said that no women worth reading were blogging, and that women bloggers weren’t worth reading. “Where are all the women bloggers?” was the plaint from one guy — which was, of course, a ridiculous question to anyone who was actually paying attention to more than their own echo chamber. About half of all the bloggers blogging are women, but you don’t see them in the ubiquitous Top 100 lists and those kinds of things. There are lots of reasons why, and many viewpoints, and I won’t go into that here. But the question seemed to keep coming up every few months.

So early last year, when I saw Lisa Stone and Elisa Camahort’s blog posts where they were musing about throwing a conference to celebrate women bloggers, I thought it was a great idea and I emailed Lisa encouraging her to go for it. As it turns out, I was but one of hundreds of women, and some men, apparently, who loved the idea of such a conference. Lisa and I emailed each other over the months as they were getting the first conference set up.

For the first conference, we hosted an online chatroom using a Flash-based application, as sort of an annex to the actual conference. The software was pretty basic, but we wanted something that would be easy for people, including n00bs, to use, without having to download programs and learn about IRC and all that. It was a lot of fun. We had women all over the world participating in online discussions that roughly paralleled the panel discussions at the conference itself.

After the conference, we approached BlogHer with the idea of building a new community website based on Drupal.

What has your role been since then?

We’ve been web designers, developers and admins for the site. The development has been frozen for the most part since February. After the conference, we’ll be able to do a proper profiling and analysis for an upgrade and addition of new features. I can’t say more about it at this point.

[Greg’s Note: That’s a good hook – I’m certainly looking forward to seeing how BlogHer grows.]

What was it that convinced the women at BlogHer to migrate their working site to a new one? And what has the reaction been to the updated Drupal site?

They knew they needed something more. They were using a Typepad blog for disseminating information — which was very effective. But to build a community, it seemed that Drupal was the natural choice.

I think the main reason was because that’s what I was pushing for. With another developer, they might have gone with another of the main Open Source CMSs. I don’t know.

Any special Drupal modules you implemented, or created during the site implementation?

There were quite a bit of little module hacks — mostly to customize the user interface. A lot of these changes we could have implemented using the locale module, but not all, and we were concerned about the hit on performance with such an approach as the site scaled.

One of the main features of the site is the blogroll. This took some custom queries to the database, drawing on weblink data, and presenting that info in different formats, from “most recently added” lists for each category to paginated alphabetical listings. This is the kind of thing that we hope to roll into a module as a complement/enhancement to the links module package, but we haven’t had the time yet. The upgrade migration path from the weblinks module in 4.6 to the links modules in 4.7 is not quite there yet, so we’ll probably start by helping out with some coding there, although it may be easier to try a migration into CCK and put the displays together using views. We’ll be looking into it after the conference.

Can you quantify the growth of the site in terms of users, nodes, popularity?

Since the site launched beta at the end of January, over 4,000 people have registered and submitted over 4,000 links to the blogrolls. There are over 7,000 nodes on the site. And it doesn’t seem to be slowing down — in fact, it’s picking up. Right now we’re seeing over 16,000 unique visitors a day, and they’re sticking around, looking at many pages per visit, according to the stats. And they’re posting a lot in the forums and comments. Not bad for a site that’s not quite six months old!

What was the tipping point where you decided to get new hardware for the site?

We had a bit of a learning curve here. Lisa, Elisa and Jory may not have been surprised by the traffic — after all, they’ve always been in the middle of the BlogHer phenomenon — but we were not at all prepared for the level of interest the site would garner right off the bat. We had developed the site on a shared server, which probably was a mistake from the start, but this company had been fairly reliable and we had other sites hosted with them that were routinely hitting 10-20,000 pageviews a day without a hiccup. But we had a lot of problems, with multiple crashes. As it turned out, the culprit was a spammer on another site sending out gobs of emails, which kicked up the server load, which had a cascading effect upon BlogHer.

We ended up having to migrate to a virtual dedicated server in a hurry — like overnight — because the web hosting company decided to shut us down, and would not upgrade us because they had cancelled plans for offering dedicated and VPS hosting, which is why we had gone with them in the first place. That was crazy. So one night we had to make a quick migration. We worked with Firebright on that, and they came through for us that night. However, over the following weeks we still had crashes, and found corruption in the database. Once that was fixed, things started to stabilize … until a few weeks ago, as traffic started to push the envelope of the server resources we had dedicated for it.

Because we all expect BlogHer to grow, especially as their Ad Network expands, we thought it was best to scale up in a way that makes it easier to continue scaling. So just a week or so ago, we made the jump to a multi-server setup, again with Firebright.

What is the configuration of the site now? (e.g. multiple web servers-single database server VS. multiple web, multiple read only database).

We’re running on a 1+1 setup: one dedicated web server and one dedicated database server, and are poised to move to a load-balanced setup when the time comes. Once we’ve had time to profile the site and run some optimizations, we’ll have a better idea of what that next step will be, and when.