Foreword

When asked to write this introduction I immediately tried to think of a good way to get out of it. Years of running Slashdot has crippled my brain, rendering it incapable of writing anything longer than a single paragraph. Perhaps a nice 20-pt. font would solve this problem! I also considered just using the same sentence 50 times, but I suspected that someone might bother reading it before it went to press, and then the jig would be up. It’s awfully hard to fake writing a couple of pages, and I’m nothing if not lazy. But I hope that my laziness will have a bit of a payoff for you at some point.

More than four years ago I registered a domain name. Being the cocky young lad that I was, I decided that I would register the most unpronounceable name I could think of. I didn’t know exactly what I would be putting on my site, but I knew that whatever it was, it was going to be a creation purely for the age of the Internet. And part of that was making the name itself a joke (something unpronounceable). I registered what seemed like an appropriately pompous name and proceeded to phase 2 of my master plan.

Owning a domain name has responsibilities besides remembering to turn relay off on your MX and paying your registration fee every year. But even more important then being the lucky recipient of 50 daily pieces of spam addressed to root@ or webmaster@ is the task of populating your domain name with exciting content. Since I had very little of that, I set about creating a tangled mess to make it easier for me to get content with as little effort from me as possible. Had I only known what I was getting myself into, I probably would have canceled phase 2 of my master plan, or at least dramatically altered it until it amounted to “Eat Sandwich.”

Slashdot has continued to evolve and change throughout its entire life. In the early days, we were just a few hundred users, and we didn’t even need user accounts because we all knew each other. The code adapted through that and countless other changes as we served our first few million pages.[1] And it followed us as our readerbase grew and changed until I sat back and was just amazed that the discussions were actually just as important, if not more so, as the words I was writing. Years of tweaks followed, some so tiny that probably nobody ever noticed, along with large changes with all the subtlety of an axe slicing through a watermelon. The evolution of a moderation system designed to fulfill our goal made it possible for a variety of readers to experience Slashdot at the level they wanted. It was a discussion board, a newspaper, and an infinite number of variations in between. And it gave them all a reason to hate me for whatever it is I do wrong today.

Slashdot stumbled through countless celebrations and tragedies, from the announcement that Netscape was going to release Navigator as an open source project to Columbine. And at every step of the way we somehow managed to adapt the code to the new challenges at hand.

At first the code was a tangled wreck. It wasn’t designed, but like many open source applications, it was evolved. The system was incapable of scaling beyond 100,000 pages a day, which caused a problem because Slashdot’s needs were rapidly going far beyond that. After being rewritten to take advantage of mod_perl, we could handle 500,000 pages a day, but even that wasn’t enough. Following the Andover acquisition in June 1999, I was finally able to hire programmers to take on the task of making Slash a true open source application. Pat and Pudge and later Krow took the trainwreck of code that was Slash 0.2 and 0.3 and turned it into the current versions, and anyone who glanced over those early versions knows what an undertaking that was.

Today Slash does what no other open source weblog can do. Every day it serves nearly 2 million pages to hundreds of thousands of users. It takes hundreds of submissions and lets a handful of authors choose a dozen stories. It lets thousands discuss News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters. And at the end of the day, it allows even a casual reader to browse through stories and maybe see a little more then what a traditional newspaper would provide. It’s distributed journalism. And while we definitely didn’t invent it, we definitely took it to the next level. And Slash is what makes it possible.

The Internet is a powerful tool that lets computers talk to each other. The Web takes this to the next level by letting people create their own sites to share their stories. But Slash is one of the first applications to take the Net and the Web and let them collaborate to create something that couldn’t be done in any other way. Building on Usenet, IRC, and even MUDs, it creates a reasonable system in which the knowledgable and the foolish can mingle, swap places, and somehow produce something that is worth reading. Frankly, it scares me that it works as well as it does.

I can’t take credit for it myself. So many people have contributed code and ideas over the years. From Dave and Nate in the early days to Pat, Brian, Pudge, Cliff, and Jamie later on. Each of them contributed in their own way to what is now known as “Slash,” and it couldn’t happen without them. But Slashdot is only the beginning.

A quick trip to http://www.slashcode.com/ provides all the evidence you need to know that Slash has gone far beyond what I had originally dreamt of for it. Sites running our code have subjects akin to the original Slashdot, such as nanotech and Perl, but they go far beyond our little niche of the net. Who knew that Slash would serve as a platform that would make it possible for tree huggers, jazz fans, perverts, druggies, and even Canadians to meet online and share what they have in common? Or don’t. The Net isn’t just for nerds anymore, and I’m glad this code has had a small hand in making that possible. If you’re reading this, it means that you have a story to tell, too, some subject that burns inside your heart that you want to open up to the world.

I won’t lie (about this anyway). It’s not always easy. I’ve had to get used to daily flames by people who have never met me over things that they know nothing about. I have learned that I am always wrong. But with any luck, between this book, this code, and a little bit of elbow grease, you should be able to get your own site up and running and start getting used to flames and always being wrong, too.

These days I’m a little older, a little wiser. But I’m still pretty cocky. And that unpronounceable domain that I registered has caused me more torture than anything else. Hopefully, what we’ve learned over the years will make it easier for you to tell your story. The Web is about letting people share their ideas with the world, and this book should help you figure out one of the best ways to do it. But if you’re short on words, try using a 20-pt. font.

—Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda



[1] This is a fake footnote. I just wanted to do that thing that they do in every O’Reilly book where they put a joke in a footnote.

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