I Need $80,000

I worked hard developing this site. I spent countless hours to bring you the new IntoxiNation - now can I have $80,000? I mean it took me about 3 hours last night and 4 hours today to get it done so $80,000 should be about right.

If you are confused, don't be. What I am talking about is the pathetic donation drive going on over at Red State. Currently they run the same platform that I do - Drupal. They need all this money to finish up development on their new system though, because Drupal is so limited and hard to use. Yeah right.

My regular readers know that I do a lot of work in Wordpress. I used to use it for this site, but decided to move to Drupal because I liked it better. I still do work on Wordpress. Just check out Firedoglake or Crooks and Liars for proof of that. I am the lone programmer for both sites. The redesign for Firedoglake took about 3 months worth of work, which was helped by a professional web designed who laid out the graphics for the new site, but all the actually coding I did. Right now I am working on a new release of Crooks and Liars that everyone will love. Me and John Amato have been working on some great surprises that people will love - I promise that.

So back to Red State. I was going to let this whole donation drive thing just slip by, but I can't stay silent any longer. Let's look at Erick's latest begging post. Here is the latest teaser image he has posted:

Then he writes this:

For those who have editing powers, such as yourself on your own posts, you'll see an easily accessible edit box at the top right. Click it and it will take you straight into editing mode -- no more clicking through to the post, then clicking the "edit" tab.

So having to click to the post then clicking the edit tab is worth $80,000? Hey for $80,000 I'll write a Drupal module that will put a link on every item the current user can edit. Hell tell me now and you will have it by the time I go to bed. I think I can punch out the 20 lines of code that simple hook will take (hint to these great Red State developers - check the hook _link_alter - that's a freebie!).

Then he goes on to say this:

Below the title, you will be able to easily see all the information you want to see, and unlike the present site, all of that information will carry over when you go into a post. Oh, and you will be able to see both total comment and new comments since your last visit.

On Red States front page the author and date appears under the post title. On the single post view it doesn't. Is this worth $80,000 or some problem with Drupal? Look at my front page then click on a post. Wow! The same information appears on both. That is actually handled within the template. Red State uses a custom template, so the lack of that feature doesn't fall on Drupal, but rather on their developers.

Now for his next "big feature":

At the bottom right, you will be able to share the post via email or through Facebook, Del.icio.us, etc. Likewise, we'll have a Sphere widget. Categories will be easily noticeable on the bottom left.

*Looks at the bottom of this post* WOW! There's a Share This link there! Now you going to give me $80,000? To be honest that was the longest part of switching over today. I decided to move everything to Drupal 6.0. It's not in final release yet, so that means there isn't a bunch of modules out yet. Further more there never was a Share This module for Drupal. Today I wrote one. I based it off of Alex King's Wordpress plugin for Share This (after all he did create it - major props to Alex!). Since Drupal and Wordpress are two totally different monsters, it did take some time to "drupalize" his plugin to work here.

Then there is this little gem:

Lastly, instead of making you worry about HTML or even attempting HTML and risking a break, we'll provide you with WYSIWYG formatting and buttons for drafting posts. We want to discourage HTML coding to prevent HTML breaks and the problems related thereto.

Holy high-tech batman! Is that a WYSIWYG editor? Wow now that is impressive. Why didn't anyone think of that before? I bet his developers spent a long time on that. Or did they?

Look familiar? Yup - they are just using TinyMCE from Moxicode. That is the same WYSIWYG editor that comes with Wordpress and can be used on Drupal via a module. Just upload it and click to activate and you got it!

I have been truly amazed following Erick's news of their new software this week. He started by saying how Scoop was some left wing software that they couldn't get developers for, and then it was blaming Drupal saying it was killing their servers and couldn't handle their load. That really pissed me off. Drupal.org is rated in the top 1500 sites on Alexa (Red State is at 403990) and it runs off of.....You guessed it - Drupal!

Let's take that even further. Red State is currently averaging 59,000 hits a day. Firedoglake is averaging almost 76,000 and Crooks and Liars is averaging 178,000. Crooks and Liars and Firedoglake comes off of the same server, so combined that server is handling over 1/4 million hits a day. Plus Firedoglake is actually higher as 3 blogs come off the same domain, so they have a much higher page view as compared to the unique visitors I quoted.

So what's this server strain Erick? We are handling 5 times the traffic you are.

Also something my long time readers my remember. When I was on Wordpress my site went down all the time from traffic. With Drupal I don't have that problem. Drupal handles load a lot better than Wordpress. I will admit that I have modified the core code on Firedoglake and Crooks & Liars to handle the traffic, but still Drupal handles high site loads great. When you have problems with servers not handling the load then it is most likely your server configuration, hardware or some poorly coded module you made in Drupal.

Finally Erick has been talking about all these features they want that Drupal doesn't offer. What features are those? He has said something about constituent type interfaces - well Drupal offers that. Hell you can even make a YouTube style site or a Digg style site with Drupal.  All of those will cost you around $0. That's right - this is Open Source and those are all freely available modules.

I won't get on someone for having a donation drive - running a site does have costs. What I have problems with is when someone tries to act like other people are idiots. You can even take Drupal or Wordpress, pick a version, and do what customize the core code how ever you want. That is open source. You don't need to write a system from the ground up. Of course why go through all that when there are tons of plugins for both systems out there?

The truth of the matter is it appears Red State's advertising is way down and they are looking for excuses to get more money in. Fine - just ask for it. Don't sit there and act like people are fools.

/EndRant