01 31 2005: so let’s talk a bit about what makes gawker’s two new ones so damned special: it took forever for them to be right. they represent some big changes under the hood, both structurally and conceptually.

nick, su and i started making gridskipper in early june of last year when it was called rezoner, its editor was the fantastically funny dana rasso (whose work i love), gina trapani had long hair and only worked on kinja, and gawker media was an occasional client for me. the name changed, the editor changed, gina got a great haircut and got her own gawker title—and gawker became one of our daily concerns. on top of that, we were working hard to change the inherent structure of gawker’s weblogs—so suddenly, gawker became an all-consuming notion.

structure first: gridskipper was the first gawker title su coded from the ground up. previously, he’d contributed partial css to defamer (which is still my favorite visual design of the entire company). when su first started working on gridskipper, gawker’s entire template structure was hard-coded into its templating system, and its code was far from standard. it was, in short, a typical weblog. that’s fine for a personal site with a few hundred entries, but gawker media has around 30,000 articles entries spread across eleven titles with one to three editors apiece. all of the titles contain custom plugins for various categorization and link management functions and custom css tailored to the title’s writing style. it’s an amazing amount of content for a huge audience. a simple rebuild of gizmodo—just one of the titles—takes about three hours to finish. movable type is a good publishing platform for smaller titles, but gawker’s needs tax its ability on a daily basis.

su began the process by stripping all of the templates for changeable data out of movable type’s templating system entirely—most of what you see is a series of includes. he then re-wrote the page structure to be as close to standards-compliant css as he could (considering some of the rather bizarre ad structures we have to deal with from advertisers) and usually spends about half his days working under the hood to make sure links don’t break, categories work, blah blah blah.

su is probably the most able coder in the entire weblogging industry. he’ll never brag about it, but that’s my job. if anyone would like a list of items to back that claim up, i’ll be happy to provide it via email. and oh, look, i’m a shill: you can call us if you need a site designed, redesigned, or worked on (weblog or not).

coming soon: articles on the concepts driving both gridskipper and lifehacker, also: why nick and i have turned into the ozzie and harriet of the weblog set.

-pk

01 31 2005: “weblogging is easy! your crippled mother could do it!”

sure it is, if you feel like launching her into a blogger account—and that’s the perception we giggle at when we work with gawker media. making a new gawker is work—and today, gawker launches lifehacker and gridskipper which took about six months for su and i to design and build. we finished tweaking design on the last iterations friday afternoon… and saturday, i didn’t even wake up until four PM.

six months..? oh my god, why!?

for that answer, you’ll have to wait a few hours. i’m writing something. for some introductory tidbits, here’s nick’s take on it for right now. oh, go ahead. you know you hang on every last word.

-pk