WordPress.com – Something Odd!

Dave Winer just reported that an ancient WordPress MU site that was shutting down has been archived by Automattic. I wasn’t aware that Harvard were using MU back in the day, but if you search, you’ll find posts like this and this one talking about upgrading WordPress MU.

Gives me a nice, fuzzy feeling seeing those long ago posts about using WordPress MU.

If you don’t know, WordPress MU began life as b2++, a fork of b2 (which became WordPress). The fork was started by me to provide blogs for the linux.ie community at blogs.linux.ie. That site is long gone, but you can see an archived copy of the front page here, where I talk about using Smarty for the theming:

We’re using the b2 weblog software, although heavily modified with the following:

Caching and templates are handled by Smarty. You don’t need to know PHP to create your template! The caching should make your page load just as fast when the server is busy as at any other time. Unfortunately, a side effect of that is that comment, trackback, and pingback counts might be stale until the page is refreshed. (Yes, I know about Smarty “insert” functions, that’ll come in a later version.)

Donncha O Caoimh, blogs.linux.ie, 2003.

I love that Automattic is now hosting the site, but I’m also glad that archive.org is out there preserving the open web. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an archive.org copy of a page show up in a Google search, however. Have you?

So much useful information is now locked in private Facebook groups, or Discord channels, it’s ridiculous. Here’s a very niche example from only yesterday. I wanted to know what bit depth RAW image files were, and one of the more useful hits was a dpreview thread from 2007!

Yesterday I was notified that I registered on WordPress.com for the first time fifteen years ago. I wasn’t going to mention it but Matt blogged a screenshot of his notification so it piqued my interest and curiosity.

I decided to look up what WordPress.com looked like back then, and it was a very simple message. There was no way to sign up. Nothing to hint at what it would eventually become. It wasn’t until later in the month when a registration form was added.

I took a quick look at what I was blogging about in July 2005. Wow, I used to post a lot didn’t I? See how easy it is to dive back into history? Try do that with Twitter and Facebook!

On the 26th I did blog about WordPress.com inviting people to sign up. Four reactions only but Matt’s post has more comments on it.

I was concerned about the price of petrol in 2005. I paid €1.05/lt on July 27th and Tesco announced they were going to increase prices to €1.20/lt. It hasn’t been that price in the last decade but it did hit a low point during the recent lockdown. I’ve been tracking fuel prices since around 2010 so I should make a blog post about that sometime. One thing it does reveal is working from home saves fuel. We refill the car once every 2 weeks usually.