Over the last six months or so I have found myself using IRC more and more. For those who do not know, IRC is a place where like minded people can create a channel, login, and talk to each other about the decided topic amongst other things.

On my Mac I am using Colloquy (which I have no ideas how to pronounce). As with most Mac apps, it’s a very pretty application and I am very pleased with it. On a PC I am running IRC through Trillian, my IM client.

What is driving me to writing this post is something I have noticed. It seems the strenth of an idea or product or a community is directly related to the activity in the IRC room. Geeks use IRC, geeks fuel successful communities.

Recently I started dabbling in Wordpress cause I have begun to feel like Movable Type is a sinking ship. Like another content management system I use, CMS Made Simple, the WordPress community in their IRC channel is huge. There is constant activity and questions get answered relatively quickly. The same can be said for the Rails community.

Now for the contrast. I had some crazy bug in my Movable Type install that wouldn’t allow me to republish my main index file if it had a normal JavaScript file call. At first I panicked and started deleting things only leading to a listing of all the contents of my root directory (ughh…no bueno). Then it popped into my mind how helpful IRC was for these kind of things with the other geekeries I am trying to learn. Upon logging into the Movable Type IRC room I pasted my question and patiently awaited my answer.

That was 30 minutes ago, and still nobody has responded. There are eleven people in the room not participating. This leads me to believe one can successfully gauge a “movement” by the number of people in the IRC room.

In the end I found my own hacky solution, just like I did in my pre-IRC days, but it wasn’t what I wanted. Why did Movable Type break like that?

Upon building my most recent site in Wordpress and gaining exposure to that community, it pushes me even further in the direction to ditch Movable Type entirely.

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