GettingIt,

August 21, 2002 3:31 PM

GettingIt, the hideously green, but biting and amusing webzine that hired every freelancer in the bay area and somehow survived on no revenue for six months is back. The full story of the rise and fall of the publication is a good one. [via waxy]
posted by mathowie (13 comments total)

Logos by Goopy!
posted by machaus at 3:39 PM on August 21, 2002

...is back.

I'm a bit confused. "Back" means that their archives are online not that they are back in business. Correct? Or am I missing something?
posted by vacapinta at 3:44 PM on August 21, 2002

There's no plan to start publishing new content, althought you never know. At the moment, this is a big archive of articles stuck forever in 1999, albeit with a completely new design and backend. The ability to vote, comment, sort and search articles is all new.
posted by waxpancake at 3:57 PM on August 21, 2002

i remember getting it! like a cross between vice and suck or something, i never really got it though :) i wonder what's going on with the thresher?

of all the webzines though i think i miss feed the most, that and/or hermenaut. oh and word.
posted by kliuless at 4:35 PM on August 21, 2002

[this is good]

Vacapinta: back as in the old articles are back. They had been taken down, (see waxy link above) and the site was offline.

I used to work there, although I didn't help Andy resurrect it. A lot has improved since it was "live" in addition to the design. For example, the old URLs were an atrocity. (FutureTense was never anything but a headache.) I always thought they discouraged people from linking and emailing them around.

For example, this is a typical old GI URL:
http://ss.gettingit.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+FTContentServer?pagename=FutureTense/Demos/GI/Templates/Article_View&parm1=A239-1999Jul24&topframe=true

Under waxpancake's new system, it's now:
http://www.gettingit.com/article/544
posted by emptyage at 4:42 PM on August 21, 2002

Goopy? [this is good]? What site is this again?
posted by Monk at 4:55 PM on August 21, 2002

waxy, how on earth did you make the old URLs map to the new ones? Care to share your .htaccess fu?
posted by mathowie at 4:57 PM on August 21, 2002

Geek alert: Apache's mod_rewrite, although I think you could also do this with a simple RedirectMatch. Basically, I tell the web server to redirect all requests starting with "/cgi-bin/gx.cgi" to a PHP script. The script takes the old article code from the "parm1" portion of the long URL, queries the database for the article id matching the old article code, and redirects to the new article URL. The Apache directive looks like this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic.FTContentServer(.*)$ http://www.gettingit.com/article_code/index.php/$1 [R,QSA]
posted by waxpancake at 5:31 PM on August 21, 2002

Wow. Mahir and the hamster dance. It's like waking up and discovering that the last 3 years were just a bad dream. (Auntie Em! Auntie Em!)

Now I just wish I could re-read all the old Feed Dailies.
posted by octobersurprise at 6:38 PM on August 21, 2002

I don't want to slam them too hard. It was a fun little corner of the web, but many of the articles read like they were the article proposal scrawled out on the bus on the way to the pitch. Salon, it wasn't. But there are some pretty good entries, too. If nothing else, a quarter of the articles gave freelancers the chance to go to an erotic fetish ball and convince themselves they were working.

If they'd had waxy's URL schema, though, they might have done better.

Frankly, Ironminds was much better, but even it had the problem for me as a blogger that I enjoyed reading it, particularly as an issue, but very few of the individual articles were novel or detailed enough to separately recommend.
posted by dhartung at 8:11 PM on August 21, 2002

Getting It always struck me as a less intellectual but somehow just as pretentious Feed, a not-so-lamentable casualty of the dot-com downturn. I'm surprised this many people remember them, actually. Does anyone still remember Word? At least they had a really cool design, back before usability came into vogue.

The story of the rise and fall of Ironminds is pretty interesting too, actually.
posted by transona5 at 9:21 PM on August 21, 2002

Well, shit. I was all excited that they'd be doing new stuff, etc, and instead I find out it's just the second time they've redesigned and added nothing.
Screw that. Just let the thing die, already. I don't see what the point was of changing the window dressing(such as it were).
posted by Su at 3:00 PM on August 22, 2002

Actually, it's the first time the site was ever redesigned. And I didn't redesign it for fun... As I mentioned elsewhere, Webpower took the database offline, leaving the story archive completely inaccessible. I wanted to give the stories I had mirrored a permanent home, but the old interface and templates were useless. So I started from scratch.
posted by waxpancake at 5:00 PM on August 22, 2002