Tim Murtaugh

Update: Hi! Thanks for all the kind words! To clarify an important point — I (Tim Murtaugh) was the developer on the Seed project — Mike Pick was the designer. He’s responsible for the gorgeous look, I just wrangled MT to meet our desires… .

So, seedmagazine.com has been live for a couple of weeks, and the system looks to be performing like a champ. The client is happy, and readership is climbing.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to document the development experience, but our process is truly organic and fluid; sometimes it’s hard to nail the experience down: But here goes.

As a prologue, Seed first came to us in June, looking to develop a blog. What we ended up with was Sciencegate, a WordPress-based journal of the happenings at the 2005 G8 summit in Scotland (now a general-purpose blog for editors and contributors of Seed). The experience was great — Seed had come to us because of our work on Cloud King, and we knocked out the blog in short order.

Once Sciencegate wrapped, our contact at Seed mentioned they were soliciting proposals for the re-build of their magazine site, to coincide with the re-launch of the newly-designed magazine. The site needed a new face, a new undercarriage, and an architecture that could handle their lofty goals of millions of unique visitors per month. Oh, and it needed to happen in two and half months.

It seemed clear to us that the only way this could happen was to use an off-the-shelf product, rather than build a custom CMS. We considered a number of options, but right from the beginning we were attracted to Movable Type.

Movable Type had a number of things going for it:

• It’s mature, which meant two valuable things — It’s been around for years (and has been field-tested to death) and it has an incredibly deep feature-set. We knew it was solid.
• It’s no stranger to large-scale implentations. MT is used by About.com and the Gawker network, both of which produce prodigous amounts of content, and rack up huge numbers of hits.
• It has a formal support system. I’m a big fan of the open-source community, and the support that’s built into it, but when you’re talking about a significant strategic asset in a company’s portfolio, it’s nice to know the people who built the thing will be there when you need them.
• It has a large and active community of plugin contributors. This made it possible to get what is at heart a blogging app to act like a news portal.
• We had worked with it before. We knew what it could do, and we knew it was a lot.
• Street cred. Everyone knows MT is the bomb, right?

So, we pitched it. And, to our mild amazement, we won the gig. We were likely the underdogs, but I think our strong confidence in MT and our success with Sciencegate helped us out. Plus — we were passionate about the project. Seed is a new breed of science magazine, with truly lofty ideals, and we wanted to be part of that.

The site is still being tweaked here and there, as every site should be, but here’s some of the stuff we’re most pleased with:

• sIFR page titles. It still feels like a luxury to be able to use a custom font for textual elements.
• The home page Flash module. This is driven by an XML file that is automatically generated by MT.
• The Flash photography galleries. Again, these are driven by MT-generated XML. Gallery construction is made nearly painless by the fantastic Photon plugin for iPhoto. (We got the idea from Douglas Bowman who uses Photon to power his amazing Photo Gallery Templates.)
• Front of Mind. This homepage module allows the editors to highlight articles on specific topics, bypassing the standard categorical hierarchy.

And then, of course, there’s the content. That’s not our contribution, of course, but it’s amazing to see our creation quickly filling up with the latest thoughts on AIDS, intelligent design, the Nobels and Girls Gone Wild.

(According to Mint, that last article seems to be very popular with Google users.)

Certain features were made laughably simple by MT — customized RSS feeds for example, as well as user management, file uploading, article archives, and a hundred other things. And to give props where props belong, we couldn’t have done without the following Movable Type plugins:

• Arvind Satyanarayan’s CustomFields,
• David Raynes’ MultiBlog,
• Appnel’s mt-categoryfaceted,
• Stepan Riha’s MTPaginate,
• As well as a dozen others.

Oh, and not to forget: I hope you’ve all noticed the Phylotaxis, the round pattern of dots at the top of the left column. Creator Jonathan Harris can explain it better than I, but it’s a visual exploration of the space where science meets culture. The colors of the dots change daily based on articles it scrapes from the around the web. Be sure to explore it in full-sized glory. The arrangement of the dots is derived from the Fibonacci Sequence, and it has become Seed Media Group’s corporate logo.

So, there it is. When all is said and done, it’s very likely that Seed Magazine is going to be one of the great science titles, and seedmagazine.com is going to be an invaluable resource for science as culture on the web.

Be on the lookout — they (and we) aren’t done yet. More’s a-coming.