Preface

This book is the product of three authors. Our individual experiences with web publishing, programming, and specifically Slash have shaped our opinions and our prose. We include these brief biographies to explain our biases and decisions, as well as to provide something our mothers will understand.

In 1993 Brian “Krow” Aker sat up late with his friends Yazz and Mike at Antioch College connecting their 386BSD box to the network. First came X and then Mosaic. His life changed that evening. It would change again in a few years, when someone mentioned an oddly named web site for news junkies.

In the spring of 1998, chromatic’s brother sent him an email from college. He’d come across a web site devoted to all sorts of interesting things, from Linux to LEGO. Run by a couple of college students out of Michigan, Slashdot had no moderation, no user accounts, and rarely saw dozens of comments on a single Story.

chromatic first signed up for a Slashdot account as the site prepared to welcome its 10,000th registered user. One day, Hemos posted a book review and sent out a call for volunteers. chromatic responded, proposing his first review a few months later. Hemos replied, “I have enjoyed your previous work and would be happy to run another review.” That lead to a long and occasionally lucrative career providing content for what would quickly become OSDN and built geek credibility.

In the spring of 2000, Dave Krieger met Jeff Bates at a Foresight Institute (http://www.foresight.org/) Senior Associates gathering. Inspired, Dave set up Nanodot (http://nanodot.org/). His administrative experiences led him to propose this book to O’Reilly and Associates, hoping to make the ever more feature-rich Slash software useful to mere mortals.

Then there’s Slashcode. Andover.net employee Patrick Galbraith became the project manager and started recruiting Brian, promising more fun than any generic dotcom could provide. Chris Nandor answered a Boston.pm email posting about Andover jobs. Cliff “Ask Slashdot” Wood and Jaime McCarthy also joined the team. Brian took on the redesign and SQL optimizations, and Patrick and Chris cleaned up the original codebase for the 1.0 release. chromatic submitted a few early patches, moved to Blockstacker’s post-Slashdot Everything project, and returned to Slash during research for another book.

Under the talented guidance of Patrick, Chris, and Brian, Slash has matured into a powerful and easy-to-use web application framework. The architecture, installer, and modularity have drastically improved.

Audience

This book is aimed at anyone interested in setting up and running a weblog with the Slash software. This includes system administrators and programmers, but attempts have been made to keep the discussion readable for people who have no desire to compile their own kernels or to rewrite the moderation system. It concentrates more on how to accomplish things than how things work underneath, though it doesn’t shy away from the greasy gears and wheels when appropriate.

Unix and Perl experience will help, though neither are required. Familiarity with an existing Slash site is also useful. For the most part, the text assumes the reader has a particular goal in mind, without knowing exactly where and how to start.

Most of this book was written in the heady days leading up to the release of Slash 2.2. Much of the philosophy and most of the interface is similar to Release 2.0. The authors have tried to describe things that will be consistent through future versions and mark things which will likely change in future versions. Until PSI::ESP is written, your best bet is to read Slashcode and the README file with the current Slash version to see what is new and improved.

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