Months after leaking their beta site all over the internet to gag vomit wtf reviews, Gawker Media has decided it can do no wrong and launched its tragic redesign anyway.

Around the internet responses have ranged from appalled to annoyed:

“It’s not fully functional, it’s full of bugs, it’s not so attractive that it cancels out the annoyance of being buggy, and it’s time-warping. All in all, thumbs down.”

“The feedback from users was overwhelmingly negative, and there were tons of bugs so … they expanded it to the entire Gawker network.”

“I’m having nothing but problems with this redesign. Hoping that it’s all early bugs that will get straightened out but the comment features seem to be a million times worse.  I think I’ll disappear for a few days, see if things get better. But, if this is it, I guess I won’t be sticking around.”

I understand that a new site rollout can involve a few glitches, but Gawker has the resources and the time to make sure this stuff is worked out BEFORE a site launches. They had this crap in beta for months before going live. You’d think such an enormous empire would have done a little more qa on this crap before subjecting their readers to it.

Also, it is the ugly now.

Jordan Reid, who makes a living being Jordan Reid, had a pretty exciting Thursday. She found a belt and dropped a taunt that she is doing something SUPER AWESOME (but can’t share what):

Yesterday morning, I was thrilled to rediscover this ’70s-style chain-link belt hiding wayyyy in the back of my overcrowded closet…Anyway, I love it, and I especially love it with wide-legged jeans and a bloused-out tank, all of which I wore to yesterday’s meeting downtown (fun announcement coming up shortly!).

So I guess we will soon be hearing about The Jordan Reid Show or Jordan Reid: Recipies for Ramshackling or some such nonsense?  That would be great, because someone who suggests you get married in a nightgown and use known allergens as table decor really deserves a lifestyle forum. Most likely Rich Tong invited her to fashion week or something lame like that, though.

Later in the day she posted about purses. Because that’s what Jordan Reid’s job is – being Jordan Reid and posting about things she wants people to send her:

In my experience, you buy a ladylike, structured handbag with a bit of reluctance, thinking that you won’t wear it much, but then it ends up being your go-to for just about every event. Or at least that was the case with my much-adored Dooney & Bourke, which was one of the handbags that was stolen out of my apartment in the Great Break-In Of 2010, and which looked very much like this one.

Never miss a chance to mention that overblown break-in story (the woman leaves her danged door unlocked and has had several home invasions, so excuse me if I don’t have any sympathy for her getting robbed). I’m suuuuuure linking to your break-in tale and then linking to a pic of you going to lunch with Julia Allison was totes a coincidence, too.

Well back I go to ramshackle glam, because she might post about how to make microwave popcorn in unique way. Wouldn’t want to miss that.

Mary Rambin, inventor of fashion week web documenting, is hotter than an apple fritter in August over Vogue Italia’s remarks about fashion bloggers:

“[Fashion bloggers] don’t do much damage because they are like moths,” writes Franca Sozzana, the editor of Italian Vogue…on her blog!

She’s talking about bloggers sitting front row at New York, Paris, and Milan Fashion weeks.

This post comes even after spending a day with Bryan Boy.  The interview is written out in Italian so I have no idea how that turned out, but apparently he didn’t change her opinion of our flock.

If you’re unaware, editors CANNOT STAND bloggers stealing their thunder/front row seats.  And they are not shy about it.  I’ve been on the tail end of a death glare from Cathy Horn (who also pens the NYtimes fashion blog)….scary as sh!t!  (And very immature if you think about it.)

As a retired, bored, don’t-give-a-Crap fashion blogger, I can tell you that even as the bloggers have gained street credibility because of their influence, the space is really over-saturated in fashion.  I was at the tents long before Tavi and Bryan Boy.  Three and a half years ago, it was really interesting to watch bloggers hit the scene. They were standing in the back scared to death when Julia and I knew full well we could post away from the empty front row seats.  Slowly but surely more came, built up their confidence, and climbed the ranks – or should I say descended from the nose-bleed seats.

Franca makes a good point that most don’t know a sequin from a button and just want to criticize what they don’t understand and a history they don’t care to learn.  But what she doesn’t dare realize is that mainstream consumers doesn’t care either.  In general people are critical of what they don’t know.  This translates in fashion to people being intimidated by the intricacies of design as an art, so they take on the “art is what you make of it” perspective.  For this very simply reason, people enjoy seeing pictures of the runway followed by a simple analysis that is easy to digest.

Everyone has a right to their opinion.  There is no right or wrong.  We have the freedom to write, say, scream it wherever we want.  Even in the world of fashion.  Gotta a lot of love and respect for you Franca, Cathy, Linda, Anna.  On many levels, I agree with you. But there is no way you can stop this freight train.

Do you hear that you snooty fashion professional? How dare you discount the very most good writing opinions of the fashion blog making peoples. Seriously though, the whole thing sounds like yet another attempt to remind us all that Mary “was at the tents long before Tavi and Bryan Boy”.

We get it, Mary. You invented blogging from Bryant Park with an omgcamera and posting it on your omgblog and commenting on the shows. Nobody had ever done that on a blog before you, you’re a gd pioneer. Sorry those losers “descended from the nose-bleed seats” and got popular instead of you, but hey, you’re “retired, bored, don’t-give-a-Crap” anyway, right?

It looks like Friday, no doubt before another all weekend workathon for the tumblr crew, this hilarious attempt to calm the pitchfork wielding villagers was posted into Staff:

Hi, everyone. I wanted to run through a few of the things our engineers have been working on behind the scenes.

Our #1 priority has been bringing your blogs back to 100% uptime. We project the graph below on our wall, showing us exactly how many error messages we are serving instead of real pages.

We live and die by this chart, and we’ve been pulling nights and weekends working to remove the bottlenecks that have made “over capacity” errors routine. The list of systems we’ve tackled includes everything from networking equipment to database queries to the deep dark insides of the Linux kernel. (If working on these kinds of challenge gets your pulse up, we want to hear from you.)

As we break through our past bottlenecks, we are simultaneously faced with growth like we’ve never seen before. Our challenge is not only to support the current audience of 55 million, but to getahead of more than 250,000,000 new pageviews each week.

Still, we’ve made incredible progress in improving our infrastructure. We’re not out of the woods yet, but we expect these coming weeks to be much smoother than the past few rocky months. We’re incredibly confident in our ability to scale to serve all of the visitors to your awesome blogs.

A couple specific issues I want to cover:

• The Queue feature has been disabled more often than not over the last two weeks. We hit an incredibly difficult problem with the way the Queue processes handle their publishing step that forced us to unwind and rewrite a big chunk of our publishing routine. The Queues have been completely restored for the last couple days and we don’t foresee any more issues.

• This morning we suffered an outage for nearly an hour starting at about 7am EST. The proxy server that handles the vast majority of incoming requests failed, and its automatic backup also failed because of an unrelated networking issue. It took us longer than hoped to correct the multiple causes, but we’ve put systems into place to make sure that even another double failure won’t cause an outage like this in the future.

If you ever run into issues, please don’t hesitate to contact support. And you can check known issues via our Twitter feed orHelp page.

Thank you for your patience and support through all of this. To make up for it, we have some absolutely epic product updates around the corner.

Coming soon, awesome stuff! Haven’t they been promising great stuff, next year, next month, soon, for the past 3 years? And hey, don’t forget to contact them when they go down so they can either a) ignore it or b) tell you to take your blogging elsewhere because they are tired of user negativity.

And I don’t know me nothing bout no computery thangs, but I think if the infrastructure holding your entire “business” together requires 24/7 babysitting and constant bondo and band-aids then maybe you need to just rip it up and start over. Especially if you are looking at getting your user base up to everypersonintheworld,000,000.

Anyway, they haven’t gone down in a whole 48 hours, so maybe they ARE making progress. Go team!

Meaghan O’Connel, editrix of the sex story book Coming & Crying, somehow keeps being allowed to write. Apparently that new media lady website The Hairpin thinks Poundcake’s  “please like me and think I’m cool” ramblings makes for awesome content. Here’s some special highlights from Poundcake’s incoherent recollections of flashing her boobs:

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Jessica Quirk, full time blogger for 25 hours a week, works really really hard, yo. She has to make sure people aren’t linking to her or reblogging her without telling her, because she doesn’t like her content used without getting compensated. Which is why I’m a little surprised to see Messica’s January 12th post:

looks suspiciously like Cupcakes and Cashmere’s January 10th post:

I get that she’s super busy with work and doesn’t have time to read EVERY BLOG EVER, but come on, if this doesn’t make the other fashion bloggers give her a side-eye-good-bye then I just don’t understand the internet at all.

Rich Tong, tumblr’s latest pointless employee, is busy busy busy begging for tickets vetting all the primo invites he is getting for shows. Now he is going be busy clippers with a whole lot of ass kisser flower bribes thank yous. And what does someone who is internet important do when they need something? Hint for a sponsorship, natch!

Aw. Well, maybe a little less time preening in front of your internet reflection and more time building actual relationships with potential sponsors before you demand free stuff, Richie.

Yeah, what am I saying. In internetsland all you have to do is say “I want free Crap” and people just throw it at you. So hey Nicole Miller, enjoy your thank you flowers that Rich Tong begged a discount for.