We had reached the early hours October 14, 2003—a Tuesday—and the new and old servers were humming away out in Eastern Daylight Time. I don't know why Markos decided on east coast hosting while living on the west coast, nor is it germane to this history, but his web host was in Georgia as of July (and at least until August), and remains in the eastern timezone to this day. (I saw a mention of the Daily Kos servers moving around New York City in December 2005...but I digress.)
The Scoop site continued humming that morning. Markos's posts here were all about the business of getting the site working and making it more user-friendly. Not that he needed many new ones: in fact, there were only two, in addition to those still available from the previous night. First, he announced the New comments format which, with less orange and more white, was a decided hit with the responders. An hour later, he ran Another comments poll: 2 columns or 3?
Meanwhile, back at Movable Type, two Open Threads (one about the Dem Primary and one for everything else), started for the last night on MT, were still active, having been posted before 10pm on the 13th and then bumped after midnight. The final issue-related post was made in the morning, Supreme Court takes Pledge case about the Supreme Court taking up the constitutionality of the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.
Before the afternoon was over, the new site was deemed ready. Making the change announced:
We have initiated the DNS change. That means both this and the original Daily Kos site may act weird. Your cookies may break. The site may be down for a while. The Cubs may win a pennant.
In other words, the frabric of time and space may rupture. I'll see you guys on the other side. Thanks for your patience.
The exact same post was made over on the Movable Type site at approximately the same time. After that, the only two posts that remain on the old site were one more Open Thread just under four hours later, added for those who were still seeing the old site when entering dailykos.com, and the final post announcing This site is closed thirteen hours after that. Comments were made in the final Open Thread as late as 40 minutes before closing. (Note: yes, I know the closing message actually says October 15, 2004, but that date is a typo, as you can see from this Wayback Machine snapshot of the old site from October 16, 2003.)
With the Movable Type site having locked its doors as of 9:26am eastern time on the morning of October 15, all the Daily Kos action was now on Scoop. Members had continued pouring in during the testing period, and now, after 36 hours, registrations had hit the 1256 mark, of which at least 761 had registered by 9:23am the day before. Another 501 members signed up in the following 25 hours (October 16 at 10:27am), but the rate slowed dramatically after that: Userid 2001 didn't appear until 2:12pm on October 17, nearly 28 hours later.
Markos had posted the first Open Thread under Scoop, about 90 minutes before Movable Type became forever immobile, with the news that the new site was live for him—the DNS changes had propagated—and if they weren't for everyone, they soon would be. This was the first of twelve front-page posts that day.
The second was an article on some new polls for the upcoming Presidential primaries, Yummy poll goodness, and a third, Markos's Hacking wishlist, hoped for trackbacks, a Daily Kos wiki, and getting back to the original page after posting a comment instead of forward to a page with just that comment on it. (Trackbacks seem to have faded as a desideratum, the dKosopedia is a going concern, and the comments upgrade wasn't to happen for another 29 months.) Other posts included one on the latest IA, NH polls, one on the Frickin' Cubs, and a final one for the day, Q3 numbers: Dean dominates, on campaign fundraising for the Democratic presidential candidates.
Meteor Blades made the first guest blogger front-page post that afternoon: IISS Report Sees Bush Assertions on Terrorism as 'Overconfident' noted that, Bush to the contrary, al Qaeda was growing rapidly as the Iraq war continued.
A diary by Chris Bowers the next day was the first diary to be promoted to the front page: ECC, Thursday, October 16. As kos put it:
I will be occassionally promoting particularly good diary entries to the dKos homepage. Chris Bowers's "Empirical Cattle Calls" are good fun.
Chris's diary came from the first day of significant diary activity, in numbers, diary length, and coverage of political topics. The prior two days were slower, as the users came to grips with the possibility of diaries, and of commenting on them just like regular front-page posts.
While debugging was still in process on October 14, there were 28 diaries by 23 unique diarists: Peter, mickey, Matt Stoller, Skubwa (who was also the first diarist), and Randomtask all did two diaries. Harry Tuttle did the first substantial diary, though it was like a regular blog entry, not about any political topic. Harry was familiar with Scoop and Scoop communities, as witness his diary two days later.
On October 15, as normal front-page activity resumed, the number of diaries was down to 22 and unique diarists to 18, with Skubwa and Randomtask doing two again, as did ChrisS and dooflow. dooflow was a teacher who wrote about a Michael Moore talk coming up at school that evening, and then published a report on the talk itself. Markos wanted to be sure people went beyond the front page, and urged people to check out user diaries as the day ended, and this may explain the surge in actually writing them shortly thereafter.
October 16 saw diaries starting to hit their stride: 66 total by 55 users, some quite substantial. Future front-pager DavidNYC wrote four diaries that day, NYCO wrote three, and another six users wrote two each. Here's a sampling from that day:
DavidNYC's first diary was on the Close States in 2004 for Prez. Election, and makes a common beginner's error still being made today: duplicating the intro text in the extended section.
folkbum runs a Vice Presidential Cattle Call Comment Period, 10/16 and garners ten comments, the first user diary to get to double digits in comments.
ChrisS wrote More about Bush's EPA on the Bush Administration's ads trying to drum up public support for their new "Clean Skies" legislative initiative, which weakened environmental protections.
Tx Bubba's diary was Bill O'Reilly and the Anatomy of a Hypocrite; some people things never change.
In Eggheads 'R' Us, Sidhe writes on the "anti-intellectualism [that] is Republican education policy".
Trapper John explains Why I Want the Red Sox to Lose, and confesses himself to be a major league asshole. I may be exhuming skeletons here, but comfort myself with the knowledge that the Sox won everything, leaving Trapper John with nothing but a front-page gig three months in his future, and thirteen comments for his diary that day.
Krugman and the revolution by Lestatdelc discusses the way that the Bush administration is dismantling much of what we've thought immutable, and received a few long, thoughtful comments, including this one from Kagro X.
Radical Middle's rather unusual (but far from tragic) diary starts with handing out Dean literature at an Al Franken event and ends the evening with Someone else's blood on my shirt and urine on my hands.
Matt Stoller's diary Republicrat Reactionaries was a well-reasoned, long diary article, yet it got but a single comment: "Wow!" The last of DavidNYC's four was published shortly thereafter, and was a plea to use the extended section for long diaries; all diaries have two sections, the intro section (above the fold, which is the section that appears on the Diaries page) and the extension section. This was long before the intro section could be limited in length by the software, and Matt's very long diary was all intro and no extension. More growing pains.
Nor were these growing pains going to end any time soon. Two months later, kos was asking for suggestions on what to do about Diary trolls, and just over six weeks later, on Feb. 7, 2004, immediate posting was over with the institution of the current 24 hour delay before commenting and one week delay before writing diaries, announced in New user changes.
Diaries started getting out of control in other ways during that same period, so on January 27, 2004, Markos announced a two diary daily maximum, and rules against single-line diaries and repetitive diaries. Site growth continued accelerating, however, and after on-again, off-again voluntary and enforced intervals of one diary per day ceilings starting in the second half of 2004, the one-diary-per-calendar-day rule was made permanent on September 28, 2005.
Though I briefly mentioned it earlier, I'll close with kos's brief post from that first night after Movable Type had shut down and the Scoop site was Official, the October 15 story entitled Diaries:
Make a habit of checking out the user diaries (I should change that to "journals"). The link is in the Menu box. There's lots of good stuff happening over there.
Needless to say, he didn't change diaries to "journals", or if he tried, the nomenclature didn't take. But he's still right today: there's a lot of good stuff happening in the diaries. Not to mention the daily Diary Rescue. Check 'em out!
~~~~~
You should also check out these TopComments, which were submitted today to the Top Comments mailbox. If you saw any great comments that are not mentioned here, please do link to them in your own comments below. The address of that mailbox:
TopComments AT gmail DOT com
(change " AT " to "@" and " DOT " to ".")
Anyone can submit deserving comments to our address—the direct link to a comment is available from that comment's date/time—as long as they arrive by 9:30pm Eastern Time. Please always include your Daily Kos user name in the body of your message, so we can credit you properly.
From madgranny:
In the FISA live blog diaries, litigatormom asks the question many of us have wondered since 11/06.
bubbanomics submitted the following despite being kinda-sorta-on-hiatus:
Still blinking out the tears from darthstar's comment. Haven't laughed this hard in awhile. Sharks with lasers are definitely scarier than nuclear terrorism, but are they scarier than President Guiliani?
ptmflbcs sent the following:
DemocraticLuntz has a brilliant comment in this Ron Paul diary.
From emeraldmaiden, my lifesaver du jour:
Pluto's answer to onetwostep's burning question What Will YOU Do With Your Rebate? is my first giggle of the day.
bobinson provided my second giggle in the same diary.
Still in the same diary, eugene provides some wise advice.
Okay, word player caused one eyebrow to levitate when I read this comment in Jason Miller's Meat's Meat ... So Let's Eat.
From sardonyx, your diarist du jour:
dwakeman states what looks to me like a basic political truth.
From Dood Abides's very funny Snakes on a Campaign parody diary, funlvn1 gets apostrophetic apoplectic on us.
Detroit Mark asks a very blunt question about Democratic Branding.
You can run, but you can't Hide from Hunter's diary announcing A Change to the 'Troll' Button. As witness:
saildude claims to have a valid license to troll, but it sure ain't made out to no saildude!
prodigal hope the change helps, but...
clammyc didn't notice the change until the diary was posted, but starts a thread that gets noticeably funnier as it descends.
No Top Comments diary would be complete without that day's top comments by number, aka top mojo—those comments which have received the highest number of recommendations from Daily Kos users like you. Today's is supplied by sardonyx, using his own revision of cskendrick's mojo-to-Excel magic.
First, Top Mojo excluding search-identifiable tip jars, first diary comments, and Cheers and Jeers comments:
1) Thanks for all the kind comments.... by Hornito — 224
2) like get back to washington by Turkana — 118
3) Agree, they need to go to DC for this by NCDem Amy — 112
4) You mean this flyer by casperr — 108
5) dated Hillary... by Leggy Starlitz — 108
6) Now to put pressure on the other candidates! NT by humphrey — 95
7) let's face it by steelman — 94
8) and the funny thing is by clammyc — 87
9) And the women in NH who signed the letter by mr crabby — 86
10) I have had it with these m'fn democrats on the by funluvn1 — 86
11) Thank you, and.... by Troutfishing — 86
12) Bless Your Heart by InquisitiveRaven — 84
13) Just pathetic by turneresq — 81
14) more bullshit by MadAsHellMaddie — 81
15) I hate to get my hopes up by IowaEdwardsSupporter — 80
16) As an American, I say Go Edwards ... by TekBoss — 79
17) and they have a chance by Turkana — 77
18) Fair enough. by TomP — 77
19) If I had a "rec on sight" list, by corvo — 76
20) i just posted on iraq by Turkana — 76
21) I know, and I thank them, and you... by Hornito — 76
22) That would be a refreshing change by FishOutofWater — 74
23) I've been married for 22 years by RFK Lives — 74
24) A significant shift by jhutson — 73
25) Wow! by askew — 73
26) No, it's the same old DLC cabal by FishOutofWater — 73
27) I turn my back for a moment and by xxdr zombiexx — 72
28) Here's the narration. by TomP — 70
29) Clean energy and Green Jobs - a real plan by FishOutofWater — 70
30) Here's video of Helen Halpin by wscrews — 70
31) "It's not illegal unless they tell you so." by Mogolori — 70
Top Mojo with No Exclusions:
1) Tips for showing some backbone! by NCDem Amy — 362
2) Movement politics of the right... by Troutfishing — 342
3) Tips/Flames? by Dood Abides — 318
4) * by clammyc — 311
5) Impeachment: You can't talk about it Enough! by xxdr zombiexx — 295
6) Tips and rec's appreciated by gaspare — 252
7) Thanks for all the kind comments.... by Hornito — 224
8) Tips for a brilliant ad. by cosbo — 223
9) tips by thereisnospoon — 221
10) tips for our better angels by GernBlanzten — 220
11) Tips for forcing by TomP — 195
12) Tip jar by Yoshimi — 189
13) Ha Ha! You were jonesin' for it! by Bill in Portland Maine — 129
14) like get back to washington by Turkana — 118
15) Agree, they need to go to DC for this by NCDem Amy — 112
16) Tips for grown-ups. by be inspired — 111
17) You mean this flyer by casperr — 108
18) dated Hillary... by Leggy Starlitz — 108
19) Now to put pressure on the other candidates! NT by humphrey — 95
20) let's face it by steelman — 94
21) a donut by any other name by Hey BB — 89
22) and the funny thing is by clammyc — 87
23) And the women in NH who signed the letter by mr crabby — 86
24) Thank you, and.... by Troutfishing — 86
25) I have had it with these m'fn democrats on the by funluvn1 — 86
26) Bless Your Heart by InquisitiveRaven — 84
27) Just pathetic by turneresq — 81
28) more bullshit by MadAsHellMaddie — 81
29) I hate to get my hopes up by IowaEdwardsSupporter — 80
30) As an American, I say Go Edwards ... by TekBoss — 79
© sardonyx; all rights reserved
All quotes are the property of the original authors or the websites that held them
