Websites come and websites go

O’Reilly shut down the wonderful Meerkat aggregator website a while back and now I see that Raph may be shutting down Advogato.

Yet another website I frequent, on the subject of Free/Open hardware, almost shut down in June. FreeIO.org has been run by Diehl Martin for years, providing GPL’d hardware designs. Unfortunately, Marty has pancreatic cancer and decided he didn’t have time to run the site anymore. After seeing his shutdown announcement, I offered to take over hosting and maintenance of FreeIO.org. We completed the transition in August. We’re still pondering the longer-term plans for the site.

I’ll miss advogato if it shuts down. Thanks for the effort you put into Advogato and mod_virgule, Raph! I’m still running robots.net on my own version of mod_virgule but I’m guessing mod_virgule is not likely to survive long without Advogato, so it may be time to rename my version and go off in my own direction with the code. There are lots of enhancements I’ve wanted to make like dropping the specialized XML templates in favor of standard XHTML templates, replacing the template processing code with the XPATH support available in libxml2, maybe replacing the flat-file db with SQL support. There’s still a lot of potential in the codebase; it’s just a few years behind the times at this point.

I still haven’t found a good replacement for Meerkat. I’m trying to use Technorati. It looks pretty but it’s riddled with technical problems and there are apparently no humans at the other end to talk to, just faceless form emails promising replies that never arrive. Technorati only manages to update from robots.net maybe one out of every ten times I ping them. Complaints about the Technorati ping problems and their non-existent technical support are common. I’ve tried several of the recommended work-arounds for the ping problem but none have worked for me so far.