AVC

Rebuilding a highly-trafficked blog, migrating 500,000 comments from Disqus to WordPress, and diving into the Google Analytics API.

Project Synopsis

Storyware was originally created to build tools and platforms that empower our customers to create meaningful content to share with the world. While we do much more than that at Storyware nowadays, we still love tackling projects that remind us of our roots. Rebuilding avc.com is a great example of a project that takes us back to our roots as a company.

AVC is the blog of New York-based venture capitalist, Fred Wilson. Fred has been blogging about venture capital, technology, and other topics on AVC since 2003. His blog last went through a redesign in 2014, and in 2019 he decided that it was time for another change with several goals in mind.

We accomplished Fred’s goals, and more.

Team

Fred’s content needed to be front and center, without distractions.

Kirk Love took a minimalist approach to AVC’s new design, resulting in an easy-to-read experience.

Fred wanted to move the AVC community discussion to Twitter since managing comments had become an insurmountable daily task.

Instead of managing comments within WordPress, Fred is now engaging with his followers on Twitter.

But, he also did not want to lose over 500,000 comments from his previous posts.

We migrated nearly half a million comments from Disqus to WordPress for AVC. This required developing custom scripts with a unique queue processing system.

With thousands of posts, Fred wanted a better search and discovery experience.

We leveraged the Google Analytics API to create a most-popular posts archive based on nearly two decades of data.

Fred wanted a a technical partner who he could lean on in the long-run for new features along with a new web host who could guarantee more uptime, and fewer headaches.

Thanks to Storyware’s hosting and maintenance plan, he no longer has to worry about hosting issues or keeping software up to date.

Quotemark

Storyware built the new AVC.com for me as well as the web presence for our sustainable apartment building company, Frame Home. They met all of our expectations in terms of scope and cost and were a pleasure to work with.

Fred Wilson
Blogger, Investor, and Developer

What We Did

  • API Integration
  • Custom WordPress Website
  • Hosting + Dev Ops
  • Project Management
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