Almost 30 Years After Rob Malda Made Slashdot It Still Inspires New Implementations
The test site this morning:
SoylentNews (soylentnews.org) uses Slash, which is based on Perl and will turn 30 in less than 2 years. It was developed by the famous Rob Malda, who sold Slashdot. Kolie, who is in our IRC network, is making a drop-in replacement for Slash. It's written in Python. "To make the deployment as seamless as possible," he has just explained, "I packaged the entire stack into a single Python Docker container managed by supervisord. This consolidates the web frontend and all the background services that keep the site running: the WSGI application (served via multi-threaded Gunicorn), the task scheduler (slashd.py), the Gopher daemon (gopherd.py), and the payment listener (ipnd.py)."
Quoting Wikipedia: "SoylentNews is a fork of Slashdot using a 2009 fork of the Slashdot engine. Michael Casadevall (NCommander), is a former New York Ubuntu core developer, and SoylentNews Public Benefit Corporation (SN PBC) president. On 22 May 2023 NCommander announced that SoylentNews will be shutting down on 30 June of that year. However, the decision was reversed in an announcement made on 5 June 2023."
Seeing that SoylentNews continues to develop the underlying software, hopefully resulting in vastly better uptime (they've struggled with that), is good news. Maybe the issue isn't Slash per se, just the complexity of it (which SoylentNews complained about in the past). Assuming "new code == more bugs" - to quote an associate - a lot more testing will be required. █
Image source: Rob Malda at LinuxWorld Boston 2006
