LOST
Name: SummerLast seen: Last week
Character traits: Warm to hot, sunny, dry
Special needs: Cooling with water or moving air
If found, please return to Europe
THANK YOU!
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)
Here are in short my tips to reduce hoarding of stuff you think you may need some day but almost certainly won't. If you're not really a hoarder - as in the worst examples that TV likes to portrait - but do have a problem throwing things away despite not having space to store all that clutter, this may help to clean out your storage. (I'm assuming it may because it does for me.)
If you have too much money you then buying storage or land to store things without having them clutter up your house is an alternative. But it's not really worth it. It's just paying money so you can keep that warmish feelng of still having access to everything but you'll also keep your problem. I mean unless you're really collecting something valuable or you become "that guy" for your town with large property where everybody goes before buying anything other than foot. Some towns have such a guy who stores avery piece of wood and metal they see so others can browse for their DIY projects. I like these guys. But you don't have the property for such a stock, do you? So don't try to be that guy for you town, for your friends or just for yourself. It takes the same amount of space in either case.
Being a digital hoarder myself, I'm hypocritical enough to have a different opiniont about data hoarding. But I'll write about that another time.
If you don't know what the CCC camp is, I'm not going to try and explain it. You'll find introductions and it's history explained. (See the links below)
I wnet again this year. For me it's a rather expensive vacation. But it's worth it and I'd probably even do it if I didn't know where to get food until my next salary.
There are so many thoughts about this event. It's just such a unique and overwhelming experience. It feels good to see that the community is able to create such an overstimulating and incredibly welcoming world. It does feel like a different world, and I'm sad every time it is over. I thought I'd write at least a few entries about the event. But I find it hard to put into words what Camp is for me and what it feels like. So I guess I'll leave it at that for now.
Here are some links to open directories I deem interesting or deemed interesting at some point for some reason or another. This list is not maintained; expect dead links.