Kudos and Criticism

I think it’s important to write about the positive things and not just rant about the negatives all of the time. It’s too easy to get caught up in always being negative, in always finding fault. I got a very nice mention the other day over at Mena’s Corner for a piece I wrote in my webhost’s forums and then reposted in the dev.demesnes.net blog. Six Apart has certainly earned some praise for the things I’ve been noticing lately, and I think the company has come a long way in the last few months and taken some positive steps in the right direction for dealing with users, web developers, and webhosts. I hope to see that continue in the future.

I know that a lot of people “jumped ship” when the licenses for Movable Type were changed last October. Many of us (myself included) were angry about the direction we perceived the company was taking. But things are not always what they first appear to be, and I’m not sure a lot of people were willing to look beyond their anger at that point. In many ways, I can make the analogy to marriage. If you have a terrible fight with your spouse, divorce is not necessarily the best answer. Anger passes, but you have to be willing to look at what remains, and what follows.

Despite the technical problems that have surfaced over the last several months, what remained, for me, was a piece of software that did what I wanted it to do, and worked with me in a way that I wanted it to work. What ultimately convinced me to stick with it, after the anger over the licensing fiasco passed, was the reaction of the people in the company that makes the software. They reached out to the community of users. They welcomed our input and our ideas. They opened a dialogue with several of our webhosts… to the point that I switched webhosts to one that was communicating with Six Apart and attempting to help solve the comment spam problem at the server level, above where I have to deal with things on the domain level.

It would have been easy for Six Apart to ignore the users, as many companies do, forcing us to do things their way instead of finding out what we needed. They chose a different road.

I noticed.