Section 23.2. Slashdot in the Early Days


23.2. Slashdot in the Early Days


From fall of 1997 to spring of 1998, Rob Malda and the other Blockstackers went through a rapid education on emerging web technologies. Chips and Dips had been entirely static HTML. By spring of 1998, Slashdot had dynamic content through CGI, and then very quickly, given the performance limitations of CGI, dynamic content via Apache modules, specifically mod_perl. The quality of HTML improved, coming much closer to standards compliant.

The purpose at this stage was a learning exercise as much as anything else. New features of HTML or Perl were learned during "day jobs" at work, and then what was learned was applied to Slashdot. By the spring of 1998, this process had begun to reverse itself. New ideas were tested on Slashdot, often proving valuable at day jobs as well.

One of the important changes during this time was the creation of submit.pl, the Slashdot submissions bin. Making submissions an inherent part of the site rather than something that had to pass through the Inbox of Rob's email made the submissions process scalable, and also enabled others besides Rob to take a direct hand in the editorial process of reviewing submissions and approving them for posting to the site.

Another key technical change during this time was the move from a web site that was merely under an account on a university server to a standalone server running Slashdot. The hardware was a single DEC Multia that Rob had received as barter payment for drawing cartoons for a self-published business book. The server was hosted at Rob and Jeff's place of employment. Their employers needed an email server, and Rob suggested that they could use that box as an email server, as long as he could do some other hosting on the box as well. Initially this arrangement worked well, though the server was subject to sudden power outages and downtime if you weren't careful to avoid the power cord when putting you feet under Rob's desk. Of course, it was a server running Linux.

While Rob's interest in Linux dates back to Chips and Dips, running Slashdot and the technology behind it really increased that interest. Naturally, content on the site itself served this need, as Rob began to accumulate, and visitors continued to send in, an impressive list of Linux resources online.

This dynamic of needing Linux to run the site and using the site to learn about Linux created an unanticipated side effect, compounded by other changes happening at the same time. Chips and Dips, while it was Rob's personal home page, had always been a community site. Indeed, this community focus is one of the key differentiators between Chips and Dips and what today we would call a blog. However, that initial community consisted primarily of other geeks in and around Holland, Michigan, and specifically, others at Hope College (though even early on the larger Linux community had interest in some of Rob's graphics work).

A university home page and a top-level domain like "Slashdot.org" are, in some sense, equally public. Both could be accessed from any browser connected to the Web anywhere in the world. But Slashdot felt like a more prominent site than Chips and Dips, and was more likely to be bookmarked by others, or added to directories, which, at the time, were still largely compiled by hand. This alone drew a larger, more global audience to Slashdot.

In addition, in early 1998, there simply weren't that many thorough Linux resources online. As one of these few, Slashdot stood out to Linux enthusiasts everywhere, not just at Hope College. The site was still a community site. But somewhere along the way in winter of 1997-1998, the community had become global. This was still a community of like-minded peers; it was, as Slashdot has proclaimed from the early days, "News for Nerds." But it was becoming a much larger community. During this period, Slashdot passed 20,000 page views per day, a level of traffic that, especially circa 1998, signified a sizable, loyal audience beyond the confines of Holland, Michigan. By way of comparison, Holland has a population of a little over 30,000.

Some years later, then-Slashdot columnist Jon Katz speculated about why this important resource for the technically inclined had happened in rural Michigan rather than in a flourishing center of technology like Silicon Valley. Katz felt that it was a community born of necessity. In Silicon Valley, technical communities abounded, and face-to-face opportunities to meet and interact with like-minded peers were plentiful. Only in a more isolated place like Holland, Michigan, would it be necessary to actively pursue a community online to find the critical mass needed to form a genuine community of interest.

A community of like-minded peers is one thing. The arrival of the masses is quite another. The Slashdot community was about to change dramatically, starting with what seemed like a small incident.



Open Sources 2.0
Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution
ISBN: 0596008023
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 217

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