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)