How Do You MU?

One of the questions on my survey of WPMU admins was: What other blogging software, if any, did you consider for this site?

Of the 30 respondents, 13 did not consider any other software. I infer from this that these people would not have set up their blog sites were it not for the availability of WPMU.

So 17/30 did consider at least one other software option. The options mentioned more than once are as follows:

• Drupal (5)
• b2evolution (3)
• WordPress (2)
• Lyceum (2)
• TypePad (2)

It’s interesting that three of these five blogging tools are WordPress-related. The other two are the free/open-source Drupal and the proprietary TypePad.

One of the questions in my mind as I put the survey together was: to what extent are WPMU admins similar to the “hackers” who contribute to open source projects?

One aspect of this question is: are WPMU admins hackers? The following three survey items are particularly relevant to this more specific question.

• I believe that software should be free/open source, as opposed to proprietary. (Yes/No question, included as a potential reason for choosing WPMU.)
• What changes, if any, have you made to the WPMU code?
• Do you contribute code to any free/open source software projects?

If a WPMU admin was an archetypal hacker, he would believe that software should be F/OS, would have hacked the source code, and would have contributed code to F/OS projects (and would be male).

I count an admin as a hacker if his responses to two of the three questions were in line with the hacker archetype. The second and third questions are open-ended, and so required some judgment in assessing the hacker-ness of responses. For example, if an admin seemed to have made just enough changes to the WPMU source in order to get his site running, I considered this to be site admin, rather than hacking.

The 30 WPMU admins who responded to the survey are split exactly 15/15 between hackers and non-hackers.

Update: The first comment, from Andrea, raises an issue I should have addressed in this post in the first place. It relates the ambiguity of the term hacker, which I’ve linked to its Wikipedia entry so that you can see this ambiguity. I was using the term in the positive sense in which it is usually used in free/open source software circles.

Two of the questions on the survey of WPMU admins related to what they liked most, and what they liked least, about WPMU.

Analysis of the Like responses shows that the most popular thing about WPMU was that it is WordPress. Admins were also pleased that WPMU is user-friendly, extensible, and open-source.

Analysis of the Dislike (actually, like least) responses shows that the least popular thing about WPMU was the quality of the code. There were also concerns about support, or the lack thereof. The specific aspect most often singled out was the way in which WPMU uses the database.

You can see more details here.

I’m starting to go through the responses to the online survey of WPMU admins I ran earlier this month.

I will post results as I go through the responses. I’ll start by posting about responses to the “What do you like most/least about WPMU” questions. That post will appear here a few minutes after the current post. It will include a link to a Writely document providing further detail.

Over the next few weeks, I will write a paper, probably for First Monday, about the survey. If you would be willing to give thoughtful comments on drafts of the paper, please let me know by email (andrew dot watson at yahoo dot youknowtherest) or by commenting here.

I’ve just tidied up the sidebar to remove the broken-link hosts referred and linked to in the previous post, and to add WPMU hosts that have come to my attention via my post in the forum. I have also delicious-tagged these new hosts as wpmu+host.

A couple of questions, about delicious rather than about WPMU.

• Is there a way of asking delicious for the unbroken sites only? I’d like to ask it for wpmu+host-broken, where “-” is a minus sign. I guess I could tag the unbroken sites with unbroken, but that’s rather clumsy.
• Do any of the many other social bookmarking services allow me to do what I ask for above?

As of June 6, 2006, I had 82 sites bookmarked with the tags wpmu and host. I intended to email the administrator of each of these sites in order to request participation in a web-based survey. 14 of the sites were no longer accessible. Those sites I tagged with broken, leaving the original tags in place. (Note that, if you follow these links, you probably won’t see exactly the same 82 and 14 sites that I did on 06/06/06).
Here are the ways in which the links were broken:

• Technical problems: 10. The most common such problem was “server not found” (4).
• Hosted account suspended: 2.
• Site taken down, with reason stated: 2. Spam, in the form of comments and/or trackbacks, was a factor in the demise of shitidid and 911 blogs. Lack of interest was also a stated factor for the latter site.