Steeph's Web Site

Menu

Entries tagged 'cat:Blogs'

Blog Updates

A year ago today, the idea to create this multi-author blog was put into practice by the second author creating their first entry. Since then I've been asking myself why I let myself be talked into starting yet another multi-author blog. (Admittedly I was half of the people taking myself into it.) After the last attempt didn't take off as I imagined for myself, I didn't think I'd make the same mistake again and start such a similar project. With the same people at that. The last time at least people posted some things in the first few months. That feels like a success now compared to draft0.de. But I'll probably pay for the domain name and server a bit longer. I don't know why. But that's how I tend to do it with ended projects. Anyway, my blog at log.steeph.de will continue to be my place in the web ifwhen (or is it whenif?) this site won't be available any more.

Over a year after starting my blog and the script that generates it I've finally set up scheduled automatic updates of the blog. That means every other night the script is run and (re-)generates the web site unsupervised from whatever files anybody has left in the input directory. I do not apologise for any weird, unintended results in the HTML output of the script or other mistakes. This web site comes as is. If you can't read it, you can't read it.

draft0 just became a multi-author blog.

When I started this blog on log.steeph.de and the underlying website generator, SBWG, it was intended solely as my private web site/web log that I could use as an outlet for more or less personal or relevant posts without the espiration of creating something complete that I should be proud of.

But as it happens, struki obtained knowledge of the site and plans had quickly been changed to make this a multi-author blog and moved to draft0.de. We had tried something similar before. But the reasons that made me take the old blog offline eventually are not present this time. So, provided we continue publishing entries, this should last for a while.

Welcome, struki! 👋🎉🥳

Project: mixlog

I just canceled some domains that I had registered. Among them were the domain names mixblog23.de and mixlog.de. Both of which were once used for a blogging platform of mine that wasn't alive for a long time. But I kept the domains just in case. (I don't know which case that would have been.)

The platform was initially supposed to be called Mixblog, but I couldn't find a free domain name that I liked. So at some point I registered mixlog.de, which by now sounds better and more familiar to me anyway.

The point of mixlog was - apart from me having a website to build and something to learn on - to create personal feed of content from different blogs on that website and other sources (RSS feeds). It could essentially be used as a feed reader in a web browser with the ability to publish stuff on the same site. RSS aggregation wasn't scaling well, so it would have been difficult if many people would have used it as a feed reader for many feeds. But that wasn't its main purpose anyway. So, you could post blog posts, image galleries (which technically were blog posts too) and links to posts on other websites (which imported the content and worked as a repost). You could follow blogs and repost and fav posts from bogs on mixlog and from other blogs as well. Classic blog comments existed too. Pingbacks and RSS feeds were supported as I still liked to think was standard back then.

I saw the platform as like sort of a twitter with fewer members, more features and without contrains (no small character limit, reblogging and following blogs from other websites was supported). When I later learned about tumblr, I started to think of mixlog as like sort of a tumblr with more features and a less professional design and UI. But I don't think tumblr even existed when I stopped working on mixlog.

So why isn't mixlog around anymore? At its peak there were three active users on the platform (not daily active, far from, actually). That included me, a friend who tested it with me in the early development stage and another friend, who tried it out for a short while. Altogether there were four user accounts/blogs. And mine was the only one that showed sings of prolonged motivation to post stuff. So when it became clear to me that nobody but me would be using it I thought it to be overblown for a personal weblog, stopped adding features and eventually took it offline instead of fixing a potential vulnerability of the underlying framework.

I guess this here is just to say: R.I.P., mixlog! You will forever have a place on my backup RAID.

(tba: screen shot)