BabbleFest

September 2, 2007

BabbleFest is the successor to Geo’s original “Blogspot” blog and originally went online in September 2005 as a php-nuke cms powered site hosted by the now-departed “Freephpnukehosting”. Greg, the original host, was instrumental in helping us to get the site up, as was the crew at Kodetech. When Greg closed his hosting operation to spend some time with his family, the site was moved to Geo’s own hosting service.

The two principal contributors, Topkick and Geo, have remained constant, with others making contributions along the way, notably Ace, who periodically rouses himself for bursts of energetic participation. The decision to leave the php-nuke platform has been made gradually. There are many feature of “nuke” that we like, but the truth is it is a very high maintenance system, with glitches that mysteriously come and go and constant patching, updating and tinkering required. Some of its most interesting features, like link and content submission by readers, became spam magnets, and the system lacked adequate, or even reasonable, utilities for cleaning out the trash. Twice we had to shut off comments completely and figure out ways to limit the spam … and none of us really knows anything about writing code. Once installed, the sytem required a whole series of third-party patched files to be even minimally secure. Reasonable security required the addition of an entire add-on script, “Nuke Sentinel”, which then caused numerous conflicts with the patched files. Two complete version upgrades later, Geo, who gets stuck with all the site maintenance and “techie” stuff, has gradually concluded, as did our original host, that site maintenance just took up too much time.

In the two years since we went online, WordPress has improved immensely, and many of the functions that first attracted us to php-nuke are now easily accomplished with WordPress. We’ve also learned enough in the meantime to not need some of the features that led us to settle on nuke in the first place. Finally, we found that most of our readers weren’t really interested in most of the “community” features, but the spambots sure were.

So, at our two-year anniversary and with over 157,000 visitors under our belts,  we’ve made the decision to move to a platform that is much easier, and less time-consuming, to use and maintain, in the hope of spending more time posting content and less time tinkering with the site.

Oh, and about that site name:  “BabbleFest” came from a post Geo wrote on another blog describing something said by presidential candidate John Kerry as an “all but incomprehensible babblefest”.  We chose it for our site name because, well, we try not to take ourselves too seriously.