Update: Rediff Chairman and CEO Ajit Balakrishnan, in an emailed response, has told MediaNama that the company cannot comment on products under development; we’ll update with details when the company is ready to talk.
Update: As @codelust rightly points out in the comments, Rediff is migrating RediffBlogs users to Wordpress MU. They’re using Wordpress 2.7.1, while the latest version of Wordpress is 2.8.4.
Over the past few days, Indian Internet company Rediff appears to have begun the process of moving users over from Rediff iLand, it’s blog based community, to its blogging platform Rediff Blogs: Rediff Chairman and CEO Ajit Balakrishnan’s blog has been migrated from iLand, as has the old Cricket blog of Rediff and India Abroad editor Prem Panicker. A user has ranted (in Hindi written with English text) about issues faced with Rediff iLand.
When contacted regarding the companys plans for Rediff iLand and Rediff Blogs, Rediff CTO Venkateshwar Nishtala declined to comment. Several attempts at contacting the Rediff spokesperson since yesterday morning have failed to yield a response. We’ll update when we have more on their plans.
All New Rediff Blogs? Migration To Wordpress
Though users are being moved from iLand to Rediff Blogs, I was still able to sign up for both services yesterday: frankly, what’s the point of Rediff running two blogging platforms?
The basic look and feel of Rediff Blogs hasn’t changed significantly since it first launched in 2003 (April, I think, since I had signed up then). Some of the new sites feature themes similar to Wordpress Themes: Panickers Sight Screen (an excellent read), has a theme based on the Inanis Glass theme, while Carrington appears to be the standard theme in use. Rediff Blogs have only now incorporated Tags, Categories, and the ability to email posts to friends. Wordpress has had these features for years, and Blogger introduced them a few years ago as well. Update: Rediffblogs has been migrated to Wordpress MU.
Rediff iLand vs Rediff Blogs
Rediff iLand is a much more powerful a concept that Rediff Blogs: with bloggers forming communities and no blogger an island unto himself, Rediff iLand (earliest archived version: October 2005) allowed blog pages to showcase not just the bloggers content, but those of his friends. See an example here. Iland does support Indic languages - Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Telgu, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, and Gujarati.
However, there were issues with the rendering of text (special characters – example). Yesterday, I was unable to publish a post on Rediff iLand while using Chrome, though Rediff Blogs worked just fine. But what really killed Rediff iLand for me, was that for the longest time, I had to register for iLand in order to leave a comment.
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2 Comments until now.
They are just doing the sensible thing of migrating to WordpressMU. That way, they don't have to spend more time/effort in maintaining their homegrown code base. The character issues on AB's blog looks like a badly done ISO to UTF conversion. MU is getting significant traction in India now, last I recall HT blogs also using MU to power it.
They are, though, running a pretty insecure version of Wordpress at 2.7. Current stable is at 2.8. Pretty silly thing to do.
Rediff iLand works perfectly. There is only one problem. Frequently, a comment posted in a blog turns into array and all previous comments vanish into the unknown forever. All iLanders have experienced it. It would be very good if you spend your time and energy into solving this problem instead of switching people from Rediff iLand to Rediff Blogs.
The reason I ( and most iLanders) do not like rediff Blogs is as follows:
1) The web designing is useless.
2) It is not possible to post new comments on guestbook. All previous comments get deleted when you switch over.
3) The archives are not as easy to navigate as in iLand ( which has a calender for browsing earlier posts)
4) It is well near impossible to post comments. I have tried many times. (It works only one out of ten times.)
5) iLand shows us even silent visits from members whereas this facility is not available in Rediff Blogs.
6) Rediff Blogs does not even have a blog counter.
7) Rediff Blogs does not have an email link to the author of the blog.(unlike iLand)