Blog Not Needed

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)

Lately I’ve been doing a little PR work for old DIYSearch, mostly because of a trend I’ve noticed, something that has really shaken something loose in me, regarding this project.

Back in the good old days, in the late 90’s when I started this site, it had a rather nice surge of visitors and links, so much so that it caught the eye of Wired News, with said publication saying that perhaps it might be too successful and collapse under its own, well, yeah, I suppose that actually did happen. It all started going south a few years ago with lots of script kiddie hacks, site instability and lest I forget about the huge life events that happened to me personally that made updating and maintaining the site almost non-existent.

Well, this caused a huge slide in new users and visitors to the site. Its sad really, but its also the way of things, no one to blame but myself.

What really shook me was the fact that DIYSearch has now slid to the 11th page of results in Google for the “DIY” keyword (we used to be on the first page, within the first 3 or 4 results).

So, why am I sharing all of this. Well first, I am big on transparency. You’ll never find me NOT reporting the bad stuff along with the good stuff. I’m not here to make this site or myself look better than I or it is. Quite frankly I consider this to be a failure on my part.

But, I’m not here to wallow in my stupidity or personal failures, I’m here to say that I am working on fixing these things. One thing is that I’m actually starting to promote the site. It’ll be slow because now, DIYSearch is a nothing site, not even visible on anyone’s radar screen, so it will most certainly be an uphill battle. I think I can do this though, its another project, another thing to figure out.

Why is this so important to me? Why bother? I suppose mostly because I have been doing this for as long as I have (11 years now) but also because, well, I’m a geek. Its a problem. I love solving problems. I love making things (which is what brought me to the DIY world in the first place!) I bother because without this, I would just go and do something else, and this is still interesting for me.

As I’ve been hinting around for a while now (better part of this year) there is a new site in the works, and its finally starting to come together. The site called, The Autonomic Us, will be the first DIY-centric social networking/bookmarking site specifically designed for those of us into DIY projects (zines, music, crafts, what-have-you.)

This has been a long time in coming and after spending a lot of time, and I do mean A LOT of time looking at the mainstream options (Facebook, Digg, Mulitply, MySpace, Orkut, Friendster…) the realization came to me, as did the original realization to build DIYSearch. There is just too damn much noise out there.

No, Autonomic is NOT out to replace the use of these sites, that would be ridiculous, but the goal behind it is to lower the signal to noise ratio out there for the news/events/announcements folks like you and me, care about.

One thing I am going to be rolling out with this site is the inclusion of Google’s OpenSocial API. It is not my intention to create yet another bloody website you have to create an account on, so the idea is to have Autonomic act as  a host for these other sites and utilize Autonomic’s functionality (posting content, friending, chatting) without worrying about whether or not you have an account. There will also be a Facebook widget as well. I should also say that if you have an existing account on DIYSearch (if you added links) that that will obviously work with Autonomic.

So, when will Autonomic be launching? First of the year is the target. I don’t have a specific date, but it will be in January of 2008, which will mark its “public beta” period.

I’m going to keep posting developments as they are needed.

Stay tuned.

So, while I actually started DIYSearch in May of 1996, the actual thing didn’t get going until November 1996. Two years later I bought the DIYSEARCH.COM domain.

Here we are, 11 years. Over a decade. Its funny to think that we’ve been doing this Web Two-Oh thing (you know, user-generated content/submissions) for that long, way before it had some ridiculous pointless tag attached to it.

To mark our 11th birthday, we have decided to beg and plead with anyone who will listen to help sponsor this project. Its starting to hurt a little (paying all of the bandwidth and server costs) and… well I’m not here to bitch and complain, just to drop a little hint. Wink wink, nudge nudge.

Anyway, 11 years. That’s a long time. Yeah sure there are a few gaps in the history, like where the site went down for almost 3 weeks because I lost my job and had to move and find a new job, yeah things break and I try to get to them as fast as possible. Its the way of such things. The site and the project has been rock stable for a year, without any major mishaps or blunders (on my part) so I’m going to take that as a positive.

I’ve been really enjoying the survey responses, and have found them immensely helpful and useful. Such as over 90 percent of you who took the survey think DIYSearch is still relevant, even after all these years. You also have been providing some excellent ideas for future enhancements, real enhancements, stuff that I am going to work on, as soon as Autonomic is launched.

Oh yeah, and lastly, I believe we have a winner for the name change. Oh don’t worry, DIYSearch isn’t going away, but I feel very strongly over re-naming it. I’ll have an announcement soon (weeks) about the new name.

Well, happy 11 DIYSearch.

I created a survey to help us better determine what kind of changes we need to make around here. We’ve based the survey around the name change, but we are also wanting to get feedback on functionality and purpose as well.

If you have a few minutes, take the survey. Help us out. We’ve asked some tough questions of ourselves and would really like your input. It’d be truly valuable.