nonsensor:mike's blog

After a harrowing few weeks, we've successfully launched Blogging Stocks, the first major joint venture between WIN and AOL. That's exciting in and of itself, considering the marked increase in press over one of our normal launches, but the technology integration that went into it was amazing as well.Jason is keeping a roundup of internet press on the site, most of which is really great. I have a lot of respect for Steve Rubel, so his hypothesis that it'll make even more big companies think about blogging is a thumbs-up in my book, hopefully that will indeed be the case.

One of Jason's commenters makes a reference to the design in his otherwise positive review, saying:

Jason, the concept is great but can we have a different color theme. Looks like some GreenPeace activists in web design team.

I like the Earth as much as the next guy, I just thought it was obvious that not only money but AOL Money & Finance is green, and technically we're part of that. I do enjoy being called the "web design team," though.

That speaks to my desire to rid the world of design teams, who are typically underworked prima donnas, and replacing them with Elongated Man-style superheroes.

Technologically, this site was a beast compared to your average WIN site, but it serves as a testimonial to the extensibility of Blogsmith. Each subdomain of the site is (effectively) a different blog, but (technically) really only a category. It's similar in that way to Paper Magazine's site, where they have 3 different "blogs" that are executed as categories.

The difference here:

• Everything is a subdomain
• We needed stock charts

AOL's Money and Finance XML web services let us pull in some stuff, and the wicked-awesome PHP guys wrote a quick and effective parser that turned it into what you see on the site. Even if I am apparently a big hippie, I'm pretty proud of the result, and I'm glad the work that went into this seems to have paid off so far.