Kit Up! is all about standard issue and beyond for today’s warfighters. The focus is primarily ground troops, but the editors give props to guys who like air and water too.
The site started on Typepad way back in 2006. Since migrating to WordPress in May, 2010 Kit Up! has increased monthly traffic by over 200k pageviews.
Kit Up! is built on Thesis, which provides a great authoring experience.
A content page from Kit Up!
I’m managing Diana Falzone’s blog and you’re not!
Op-For.com is a real deal military blog, written by VMI grads on active duty, reserves and retired. They’ve got a bit of John Wayne to them, and like to bring the bat and ball to the party.
The site was started many moons ago, back before anybody knew what a blog was. It moved to Movable Type back in April 2006 and quickly earned honors for great content and great spammability.
I migrated the Op-For from Movable Type to WordPress and the Genesis theme framework in January 2011. I really like the built-in author archives provided by Genesis and the Prose child theme.
Comment spam has been halted by brute force use of IP blocking, Akismet, Bad Behavior and a checkbox. I’m still evaluating SEO and other gains from the migration but the site has been running without problems and steadily gaining traffic.
Op-For.com Author Archive
If you can live on military pay, you can live on anything!
Imagine managing a site with 15+ authors. Now imagine that they’re strewn all over the world, stressed out with spouses in harm’s way, kids on sugar and a military payroll to deal with.
Defense Tech was started by Noah Shachtman, he of Wired’s Danger Room. Noah’s site looks just like the OLD Defense Tech, right down to the categories!
DefenseTech.org
Anyways, when it was on old Movable Type Defense Tech was both “the intersection of technology and defense from every angle” AND the intersection of comment spam from every spammer. It was definitely an epic migration, to migrate from Movable Type 3.2 to WordPress 2.something. Too many redirects, too many lessons learned, but it resulted in a great site.
Defense Tech is a big site, with over 5,400 posts, 80,000+ comments and a dedicated community of readers.
The site uses the Thesis theme which I really love…for authors, but not so much for coding. I also do a lot of IP address blocking to prevent comment spammers.
