Ozblogistan

Ozblogistan is a one-man show, at the moment. I started it because I felt that an Australian-centric network of bloggers would be useful for newcomers, and because it would make it easier for everyone to earn a bit of pocket money from advertisers by aggregating page-selling power in one place.

So far I have been reluctant to officially launch it through big blogs like the Terrible Trio, or through widely read metablogs with an Australian focus like Blogpond or Problogger; or even indeed to bite the bullet and start pumping out press releases. “Soon”, I’ve said to myself. “Once I have the technicals licked”.

And therein lies the rub. Anybody who follows my ramblings at Club Troppo knows that my hatred for Wordpress has grown more nuanced and detailed in the passage of the years I’ve had to spoonfeed it. These days it has gone beyond mere contempt into loathing and detestation. Very uncharitable and impolite, but my distaste for Wordpress has grown beyond civilised boundaries.

Anyway. Ozblogistan runs, in part, on a variant of Wordpress called Wordpress Mu. This latter program adds a few extra layers of code to allow multiple blogs to run within the same top-level domain and share user logins and so forth. It’s the code that powers Wordpress.com, who currently host millions of active blogs.

But, as it turns out, they use a loophole in the GPLv2 to keep a few juicy bits to themselves. Such as the nice bit that makes CNAME redirection work properly. Hmmm. It’s also easy to overlook that Automattic (the company behind Wordpress.com) have tens of millions of venture capitalist dollars and about a dozen employees; I have a part-time casual job and the few hours per week I can spare to try and headbutt Ozblogistan into shape.

Consequently I have decided that I will turn off automatic registrations for Ozblogistan for a while, to limit my exposure to stressful difficulties. Acting as administrator for even one busy site is actually a very taxing job, as I have learnt at Club Troppo. Today I also oversee Skepticlawyer’s new site and the handful of sites who have attached themselves to Ozblogistan so far.

I will continue to honour these obligations, but I won’t be allowing new registrations that I don’t add myself — that is, I will only add blogs by invitation or on application by email. I plan to write a replacement blog engine — a bit of a geek rite of passage these days — that will do my bidding in the way I want. More on that another time.

Update: The previous outage seems to be a combination of MySQL being incorrectly configured by yours truly, and an hourly backup script that creates 300 new processes. I’ve pushed it back to run daily instead.