Happy New Year. I'm leaving Vox.

(With apologies to Samuel.)

Hi, I must be going. I'm running into more and more issues that stop me being happy posting here.

• Data ownership

  My other hosted blog is on Tumblr. Unlike Vox, they let you use a custom domain so that you control the URLs. I realise Six Apart make a nice living off doing this with TypePad, and Vox isn't really aimed at the sort of people who care, but I do, so maybe this isn't the right place for me. Related to that:

• Badly documented, badly supported API

  To get my content out of Tumblr, I need use only one API call: /api/read/json, with well-documented paging parameters. In contrast, I've spent several hours grappling with the Atom API that Vox supports, finding it inconsistent, barely-documented, broken, and otherwise infuriating. I dare say eventually I'll manage to liberate all my data, but damnit, it should be easier than this. (If you're lucky, there'll be a follow-up on how I managed to get on, with more technical details, later.)

• Lack of one-click export support

  ... in fact, it should be that easy. I believe Blogger may recently have added this; certainly Pownce had to when they were acquired and shut down. I don't want to wait until a crisis point, though; I want backups of my content as and when. The recent loss of JournalSpace and AOL Homepages show you can never be too paranoid.

• The HTML editor still doesn't work in Safari

  Well, it's better than it was; instead of locking up your browser, it does now allow you to post. Unfortunately, it also inserts loads of random tags that mess up formatting when I come to copy the entry to anywhere else

• Even in Camino, the WYSIWYG editor can mangle things
• There's no raw view, which makes fixing the editor's bad HTML even harder
• The best bits are now in Movable Type's UI

  When I started using Vox, I still had Movable Type 2.6 on my personal site. I still do, but I have a version of 4.1 or something on my laptop, and at some point (probably sooner rather than later, now) I'll deploy it to husk.org proper. A lot of the niceties of the interface in Vox are replicated over there.

  (Meanwhile, Six Apart still shuffle backwards and forwards on whether MT is free or not. I think for my uses, it's definitely free as in beer, but I can choose between whether I have a copy that's free as in speech or not. Sigh.)

• Lack of control over page design

  Editing a header image and choosing from some (admittedly pretty) backgrounds is a bit poor when you compare it to Tumblr. Sorry.

• No stats/analytics

  Even Flickr has stats now, and Tumblr lets you add in Google Analytics to your HTML.

• The UI feels too "heavy"

  When I started using Vox, it felt nice and simple compared to that MT 2.6 editing screen. Since then, however, we've seen Tumblr, Twitter and ffffound, where the posting interface is a simple text box, bookmarklet, or similarly stripped-down. Editing on Vox feels like it's a battle far too often.

• There's no feeling of community / not a one-stop shop

  Vox feels like it was intended to fix some of the issues with LiveJournal and the isolated blogging of MT and TypePad, but sadly it never hit critical mass. Similarly, the idea of allowing users to upload all their stuff was a nice idea, but it doesn't seem to have worked out, for me anyway. (Once again, Tumblr does both of these right, for me anyway.)

• It's not going anywhere

  I don't know what Six Apart's focus is, but Vox definitely doesn't feel like it's part of it. While I'll continue to watch them with interest, it feels like a lot of the work that's been going on hasn't really had any useful impact over the last couple of years.

I'm not going to give up posting; as I said above, I do have a Movable Type installation I'll be reverting to, and I'll continue reading what my friends and neighbours have to post. However, I don't feel comfortable posting here any more. Sorry.

Comments

[Chris Devers]

[this is good]

[Pip]

I'd always wondered why you liked Vox so much, but realising you've been running MT explains a lot ;)

[Paul Mison]

Well, it was a particularly old MT as well. I didn't upgrade during the 3.x releases because it was one of the periods when Six Apart were projecting an image of Movable Type being non-free (in both senses), but Vox seemed like it had a nice community, and as I said, it felt easier to post here.

However, in the two and a half years since I joined, even lighter, easier services - for me, Twitter and Tumblr - have come along, and I'm no longer willing to give up the control I was happy to cede back then.

Annoyingly, it seems as if my local template modifications for the shiny new 4.x series MT have evaporated somehow, but even so, I'm intending to get a new version of chaff out sooner rather than later. (Why not Wordpress? Well, partly there's a kneejerk anti-PHPism born of being an old hand with Perl, but also the fact that I'd like Six Apart to succeed, for all the mud I've slung at them in this post.)

[miz_ginevra]

" When I started using Vox, it felt nice and simple compared to that MT 2.6 editing screen"

wow, you are old-school!

Anyhow, I'm the TypePad community manager, but I've worked a lot in Vox and MT too over the years, so if there's some specific questions you'd like us to help address from this post, I'm happy to do so - either via email or on this post, whichever you'd prefer. My regular email is ginevra@sixapart.com.

[Indian-TV]

[this is good]

[bubb]

I don't suppose you have any hints or code to help get content out of vox? My partner wants to move her blog elsewhere and I have to figure it out. I've previously grabbed another of her blogs using an XMLRPC API but I'm having no fun finding a library for the Atom stuff Vox uses, not least because it uses WSSE authentication and I'm not sure that other Atom libs do?   Ideally I'd like to do this in Python as that's what I write the most in, but I can swap to other langauges if required. (it'll just take longer to do the mental context-switch)

[Paul Mison]

I never did get any code working, but I did try the <a href="http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2010/01/27/vox-importer/">Wordpress Vox importer</a>, which seemed to be the best way to get it into my Movable Type installation. The Wordpress format is well documented, if a bit odd, so that might work for you as well. 

You will need to sign up for an account, though (although you can always purge it later).

[Paul Mison]

Posterous also now offer Vox import. I've heard some people have had issues, but it worked for me. They also have a (snowflake) API so you can get the posts back out later.