January 22nd, 2008: Autonomic Will Launch
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007
I’ve been posting about it here and there for the better part of this year, and with life and day-job getting in the way, I’m finally in a position to set a date, one which I can stick to.
So, coming this January, the 22nd, in the foul year of our lord, twenty-aught-eight, the.autonomic.us will launch.
What’s all this anyway, you may ask? Let me tell you a little story. Back in the heady days of the start of this century, diysearch had a huge feature bloat, by the name of PHP-Nuke, an open source portal system. I hacked together the search engine and stuck it into this god-awful mess of a framework and released it. It gave me more troubles (security and otherwise) than I will ever fully remember, but there was a feature people really loved. The ability to post news/announcements and other pieces of content.
Well, I really liked that too, and when I re-wrote diysearch in late 2005, and stripped it back to its bare-bones i ditched all of that stuff, with the promise (to myself) that at some point, those types of features would come back.
As time went on, i decided i didn’t want to really “muck” up the search engine with a lot of content, i mean, lets keep the search engine doing what it does best, providing the directory of links, along with a few “web two-oh” tricks (link popularity tabulation for example, which is controlled completely by the user). But darn it all! I wanted the ability for people to submit actual content! This idea was hatched to launch a sister site. Bing! problem solved. The two sites will be tightly integrated (yet loosely coupled) so that the experience will be (hopefully) pretty smooth and while each site will look and function differently, it will be such that no learning curve will be required.
The sister site called, The Autonomic Us, is going to be the Digg of the underground DIY world and culture (I hope). Hell, for all I know it might be a miserable failure (defined as no one using it), but that isn’t going to stop me from trying!
Mark your calendars, and get ready! (or not)
