Why I need your wallet [UPDATED]
By Erick Posted in Miscellanea — Comments (42) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Thanks to those of you who have contributed to our redesign effort. A number of you have asked some technical questions and, though not a techie, I hope I can answer them.
First, a number of you want to know why we need money if we're connected to Eagle Publishing. That one, to me, is easy -- Eagle contributed $55,000.00 to the redesign process already. RedState earns Eagle exactly zero dollars. So we really do need your help to raise the additional money.
Second, everyone wants to know exactly what we're doing and why we're leaving Drupal.
Let me handle these in reverse order.
We're leaving Drupal because we don't like it and neither do any readers who have been around here for a while. It is difficult to use and it is hard to add new features to. We actually tried to keep Drupal. We spent a lot of our budget trying to keep Drupal, despite our developer telling us we should not. We finally listened to the Developer and it has been refreshing to see what they were able to put together for us.
Over the past year and a half, we've found more and more that we have had to conform to Drupal, not the other way around. And adding modules has caused conflicts with other modules and customization work we did when we switched to Drupal. A fresh start was required.
Now, on the other part -- I know a lot of you want us to switch to Ruby. It's new and sexy. But we trusted our developer who initially recommended Ruby, but after delving into RedState, decided we did not need it and we would have scalability issues and database issues to deal with that would cause problems.
Instead, we are going with a CMS built in Django. Already I've been playing around with it and it is much easier to use than what we've got with Drupal. It's much more flexible. It's much more responsive. It's much more intuitive. It offers a lot more that I, a non-techie, can do without having to rely on paying someone else to figure out.
The problem, of course, is that we're out of money. We need to raise more to finish the site and get it out the door. We're only going to be able to do that with your help.
Please consider a contribution.
[UPDATED:] One of our development guys came in to get some info, saw this post, and pointed out to me that I've understated what we've already paid. Eagle has spent $55,000.00 on the development of RedState 3.0, but it has also expended $20,000.00 on third party software we're going to incorporate into the redesign to give you guys some very top of the line tools for this coming year. But, we still need your help to finish the redesign effort. A fully armed and operational RedState is going to be awesome.
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Why I need your wallet [UPDATED] 42 Comments (0 topical, 42 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
Sorry, but all of my excess income that isn't going to my church is going to Mitt Romney for President, Inc. :-)
I certainly can't blame those of you who are giving to candidates. That's reason number one I hate even asking.
.. to be asked.
I'm in, thanks for a wonderful site. In addition to the passionate political debate, there is a wealth of knowledge to be gathered from here. I am definitely taking more than I am giving from here... and it is appreciated.
Fred got his a few days ago. RS is important in this race too, though.
Thanks Erick for a bit more technical background. If volunteer technical resources are desired or accepted, please let me know. (whether an extra brain can be used for analysis of configuration, development, layout, security, etc. etc..... or just testing- or anything in between)
$80K to custom build the site. I'm in.
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It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
--Aristotle
Why can't RedState generate more revenue from ads? Aren't D-Kos and other lefty sites as well as most Conservative sites financed by ad revenues? I would imagine that the readers here are a desirable demographic. Why can't RedState be a place where advertisers come to drum up some business?
Honestly? I think we can. We haven't invested a lot in ad generation. Once we went to Eagle, priorities shifted. When we were on Blogads, we were making enough money to support me and my family.
I think, once we get through the redesign, we're going to work on the revenue generation part of RedState. Right now our focus is on user experience.
One mistake we made: We thought we could do that staying on Drupal. We couldn't. And our miscalculation costed us a chunk of our budget.
Once you are self sufficient, this site can be the place to go for Conservative conversation. A small donation is on its way to you.
Too many sites are so cluttered with advertising -- besides canvas space, you got pop-ups, ones that expand and contract -- a kind I particularly hate with a vitriol that would scare you if you knew how I once made a living (h/t Townhall, who does these and I no longer visit there) -- and ones that flash and otherwise annoy.
So, I'm cool with revenues as long as they don't completely sell their souls to income generation.
Stare decisis is fo' suckas -- Feddie
....and I used to be a columnist, editor, and blogger there.
I stopped because of Ann Coulter though. If they want to ride her movement-hindering money train, putting her picture all over the place then that's great for them, but I don't have to read it. And I won't.
to giving to candidates.....I have donated to Fred 4 times over the past month and I just got another email....but at the end of the month my family will give more....hopefully you have no deadline.
Freedom of Religion not Freedom from Religion
I'm sure about 15 different people will be quick to point out how very little I know about website design, so let me do it first. I don't know much about website design. I'm friends with designers, but don't do anything with it myself.
That said, $55,000 for a website redesign seems really, really excessive to me. That's a whole years salary to make things look pretty, so I guess I'm wondering how on earth something like this, that you've said brings in zero dollars, could run so much unless someone seriously screwed things up or the money is going to other things.
I don't get it. Honestly, I think this may come from my time at LiveJournal, which is one of the most popular blogging sites, during it's moving forward phase. Redesigns just don't hit that amount without serious issues.
Again, just my highly un-web-educated point of view.
"I'm just beginning...The pen's in my hand...Ending unplanned"
Basically that amount is covering a fair amount of work for a redesign and then starting all over again with a total rewrite. The redesign was in Drupal, which we're now discarding because of the serious issue that it's just not at all the right engine for Red State. The rewrite is in Django, in which we're basically getting Red State implemented right from the ground up.
Maybe if I had a better grasp of exactly WHAT redstate was getting for $70,000 I might be more supportive.
"I'm just beginning...The pen's in my hand...Ending unplanned"
Is to try and guess what the market will bear.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
What does that mean?
"I'm just beginning...The pen's in my hand...Ending unplanned"
This winds up being an artisan product. Its a one off and the producer has a volume of exactly one. There is no manufacturing run to amortize costs over and only a small recurring income for maintenance features. So the price is usually set to a maximum amount, based in part on amount and difficulty of the work, and in part how important the end product will be.
In Redstates case, my guess is its a 11 on a 1 to 10 scale of importance.
If Eagle had a deeper tech bench on staff, they could have outsoruced this for about a fifth to a quarter of the cost.
The above are all estimates on the limited previews we have seen.
______________________________
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
I won't work my looks no more.
"I'm just beginning...The pen's in my hand...Ending unplanned"
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
I referenced my favorite youtube video. If you haven't seen the "excuse my beauty" video, it's worth a giggle.
I'm just not going to agree with $70,000 for a site design, which is fine because it's not my site and I have nothing to do with how it's run. To me it seems excessive and that's ok.
"I'm just beginning...The pen's in my hand...Ending unplanned"
Its one of those things that is worth what someone else is willing to pay for it.
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"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
I live near, and work in The Peoples Republic of Ann Arbor. People in AA pay 20% more for everything, from Taco Bell to furniture to groceries, JUST for the privilege of feeling superior. WHY are prices higher in AA than five miles away in Ypsilanti? Because that is what the market will bear.
just to feel superior.
"I'm just beginning...The pen's in my hand...Ending unplanned"
Funny, we went with the low end of estimates. Most people were charging us over $100,000.00 to do the work.
This is not to feel superior, it is because we need to move from one program to another. And along the way that requires moving a database that is written in one programming language into another. It requires redesigning our templates. It requires lots of additional programing. It includes buying the software.
If you don't want to contribute, don't contribute. But I've spent a year on this thing doing the best I could do to get everything we need and a good bit of what we want.
Sorry you don't understand why it costs so much. But we did want to hire good people at a reasonable price. And what we're paying is quite reasonable for what we're getting.
"I'm just beginning...The pen's in my hand...Ending unplanned"
Web sites that start from custom scripting are a serious undertaking. not only do you have to write them, but then some have to test them. And sometimes, if they don;t operate as planned, they get to be rebuilt (from scratch).
Just imagine if RS was more then a blog site, including lots of hosted images or videos. Storage alone would run $80K just for the terabytes of hard drives.
_____________________________
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
--Aristotle
Since ya'll ditched the paultards, I guess I'll chip in with this POV.
I do this kind of work. The prices for custom software development makes eyes bulge at first for a lot of people. They forget that it's contract work. Whoever is doing the work will get to give a big chunk of that to the IRS at the end of the year since nothing is withheld. He's also paying for health insurance out of pocket. I guesstimate we're talking 4-6 months of more or less fulltime labor by a skilled professional.
As a libertarian democrat, I'm somewhat sympathetic to where the Paultard geeks are coming from. Having to write a five figure check to the IRS every year while living in a rental and driving an eight year old Honda Accord makes abolishing the IRS a really attractive proposition.
If the LiveJournal staff has paid developers around to work on reworks and rewrites, then you have to add that to how much theirs cost.
RS doesn't have any of those. There's an Eagle sysadmin, but nobody dedicated to writing code for Red State.
At the time I had stuff to do with it, I think there were 3 programmers but 2 of them didn't get paid. The other was Brad Fitzpatrick who I don't admire.
"I'm just beginning...The pen's in my hand...Ending unplanned"
You guys are next on the list.
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Romney-- I would cry all the way to the polls
McCain-- I would hold my nose and cry on the way home
Huckabee-- No way, nohow
Giuliani-- See above
Paul-- 10% in Iowa? What wer
He just might pull the loafs and fishes thing for you. What better redesign can you get than divine-redesign?
As soon as McCain pulls out of the contest I'll donate $25 to celebrate.
Yea and Mullah Huckaboob can have his daily devotional message feature on the site....or maybe not.
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Proud member of the Barry Goldwater wing of the party !
Sorry it couldn't be more since improvements to this site would be great. I'm also tapped out due to Fred...
Erick, put this up again every week, you might keep collecting. Those of us not independently wealthy need to wait for paychecks. ;-)
You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.
As a developer who's gone down the road of hand-crafting CMS software from scratch and felt the pain over the long haul, I wish you the best of luck.
I'm a bit biased -- I'm one of the core developers on the Drupal project, and my ears perk up when I hear of a site experiencing problems. I hope that you don't feel that there's been a lack of help from the Drupal community: I noticed that over the past two years there appear to have been only two posts from folks that are affiliated with your site on the Drupal.org support forums, issue queues, and other community support resources. The volunteers that make up Drupal are a tremendous resource, and if you're looking for help it's a shame to overlook them, especially considering your concerns that liberal organizations already have an advantage in volunteer time.
I note that you don't seem to have a number of Drupal's built in caching and performance enhancing features turned on (you're serving up individual CSS files, when it can automatically consolidate and compress them into a single one), and you're also running the Devel module. It's intended for troubleshooting and administrative use, and can cause its own performance problems when left running on a live production site. Also, you've turned on 'Full HTML' input for users. That's a pretty significant security risk, as it allows malicious folks to post HTML that contains XSFR attacks, Javascript code, embedded XSS exploits, and so on.
It sounds like you have a primary developer who's more comfortable working in django and python than Drupal and PHP -- it's perfectly understandable, and if you've had difficulty securing help from experienced Drupal developers it's understandable. Over the long haul, it makes sense to work with the technologies your committed developers are most familiar and comfortable with. I'd just hate to think that your decision would be based on a mistaken idea that political bias in the Drupal community -- with its thriving volunteer and commercial ecosystems -- is preventing you from receiving help when it's needed.
We just don't like Drupal, and our users were disappointed with it ever since we went from Scoop. It's just not a good fit. We had an established user base, and a relatively non-technical one. The transition lost features and was unpleasant for many users.
I was surprised with it when I first heard we were moving to it. For a PHP engine it's rather good, since so much PHP code out there is total garbage. But even so, the PHP community drags Drupal users down. Even if the core is stable and secure (I'm subscribed to the security RSS because I help another site that uses Drupal, The Minority Report), if you watch the security announcements, the third party development is riddled with security problems that need patched.
The result is that if you want to have something secure added onto the Drupal core, you probably have to hire your own competent developers and write it yourself. However, Red State's long-time technical developer doesn't do as much for the site as he used to (hey, anyone doing THAT much unpaid work is going to burn out sooner or later on it all) and, well, no matter how driven for Red State I am, I'd never volunteer to write PHP on my own time for it. :-)
So yeah, as it turns out, both Red State's contractors and their potential new free developer (me) would much, much, much rather work with Django and Python than Drupal and PHP.
It's not really so much a knock on Drupal as much as the fact that Drupal just isn't right for what we want. I'd still recommend Drupal to someone who wants to launch a small site quickly, with little technical knowledge needed after installation.
Political bias was in Scoop community, not Drupal
Well, I guess we'll just have to disagree on geeky grounds rather than ideological ones, then. ;) In any case, best of luck with the work on the site. I'm sorry that things didn't work out for RS with Drupal.
I just click "Pay Now" for $50. Git 'er done!
Question. Can't Eagle Publishing help you out? or no?
Just wondering, because the left has been saying it. I'm kinda new, so please forgive the question.
-Chuck Adkins
Personal Blog:
http://chucksplaces.mee.nu/
A Somewhat Christian Blog: http://waywardfundamentalist.wordpress.com/
Political Blog:
http://politicalbyline.blogspot.com/
Basically, we messed up and tried too hard to keep Drupal, spending too much money, so on this project the Eagle well has run dry for doing it the right away.
See the update at the bottom of Erick's post here.
I reread up there... never mind. Sorry to hear you're having issues ith drupal. I used the plug in for TinyMCE editor, which I used on my domain, until I brought it down. (My wordpress blog got hacked by some... uhmmm.. "Conservatives") But the performace wasn't what I wanted.
I wish you luck with the new site, if you need help, ask. I'm always here. and I'm honest, If I'm clueless, I'll tell you. :-)
Ever consider Wordpress MU? (Mult-User) it's free and VERY configurable and has Plug in's galore!
Just some thoughts for y'all.
-Chuck Adkins
Personal Blog:
http://chucksplaces.mee.nu/
A Somewhat Christian Blog: http://waywardfundamentalist.wordpress.com/
Political Blog:
http://politicalbyline.blogspot.com/
W.C. Fields for President!
www.shortenurl.com/7cxfm