share.opml.org, retired 

We turned off share.opml.org yesterday, for good, as far as I know. It was a good idea, but we never got it together to make it the powerhouse I wanted it to be.

Now that Google and Bloglines both have discovery mechanisms, based on what you and others like, there would only be a future for SYO if it were a thriving and growing community, and it isn't.

Normally, we'd leave a site like that running indefinitely, but this one needed its own server, and I wanted to cut expenses now that the S3 bill is going up, serving some big JPEGs and generally being the back-end for a community that is growing, the people using FlickrFan.

If there's a big demand to bring it back, we can -- but that's going to require cash flow to go with it. At this point, I don't think it's a good investment for me.

Still diggin!

My Digg clone -- from Reddit! 

11/26/07: "I wonder if we could start a Digg-like community with the readers of Scripting News."

It would be the editorial system of a community formed around this blog. Eventually, every blog with even a small number of regular readers would have one. The bigger the blog, the more like Digg it would be. That's not necessarily a good thing, because as these things get large, they move away from the eclectic and toward the humdrum

1/22/08: "You will be able to make three kinds of reddits: public, restricted, and private. A public reddit is just like the current reddits: anyone can view and submit to them. A restricted reddit allows anyone to view the content, but only invited members may submit, comment, or vote. A private reddit is like a restricted reddit, but with the additional restriction that only members can view the content as well. Moderators of a reddit will be able to remove posts and ban users from their reddits."

Bing!

Scaling is like memory management 

Continuing the thread on commoditization of scalable server software, the third installment.

Matt Tucker said: "I'm not sure that S3 magically kills off the scaling priests. It certainly makes it easy to turn on more storage resources, but writing an application to scale efficiently across multiple virtual machines is no easy task."

To which I responded... It won't make scaling obsolete, but what it does do is commodify it.

Right now I can't buy a Jabber server that scales without also hiring someone who will scale it for me. But in a few years I should be able to buy a Jabber server that, when it needs more CPUs, just asks for them all transparently to the user, the same way my word processor asks the OS for more memory today.

I remember word processors that didn't do memory management, you got a 64K buffer and that's it. One document. When you filled it up, you started another.

Technology will go forward and scaling won't be a black art, it'll be something built into the software you license.