Blog.onet.pl

» see blog.onet.pl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Onet opened its blog service in February 2004, on the correct premise that most people who wanted to write something on the internet did not want to learn HTML first. You picked a name, you got an address under blog.onet.pl, you typed into a box. There was a lightweight mobile version called OnetBlog Lajt for the phones of the period. Onet ran a Blog Roku contest from 2005, Blog of the Year, and for a few years the winning blogs were turned into printed books.

In July 2006 Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, who had been Poland's prime minister until that summer, started a blog on the platform. Onet built a separate zone around him for politicians, journalists, athletes and other people whose names the portal could put on a front page. That is the full arc of the portal blog as a product: a free writing tool for everyone, with a velvet rope at one end of it.

The portal was also running a second blog platform by then. Blog.pl had started independently in 2001 and Onet bought it in 2006, so for most of the following decade one company owned two Polish blog services and let both of them run. I never wrote on either and I do not read Polish. In Turkey the same years were Blogcu, which did the same job on the same bargain, and I watched plenty of people at university put their first paragraphs on a platform that someone else owned.

~ the record ~

~ the wordpress switch ~

In July 2012 the service was rebuilt on WordPress underneath, and new blogs in the original format stopped being possible. From there the platform could only shrink. The people already writing stayed where they were, nobody new arrived in the old format, and that arrangement held for five and a half years before anyone called it an ending.

~ the export window ~

On 8 December 2017 the Onet-RAS Polska group announced the closure, with a deadline at the end of January 2018. The reason given was the growing role of social media, which as a place for building communities and exchanging thoughts online had taken over the role of blogs. After enough users asked, the date moved to the end of February. On 1 March 2018 the addresses started sending visitors to the portal front page instead.

What users got was a download. Take your posts and the comments underneath them onto your own computer, or move them to something WordPress could import. The address was not on offer. No way to keep it, no automatic forwarding to wherever a blog went next, so every inbound link to fourteen years of Polish writing broke on the same day. Polish bloggers wrote about this at the time, on other platforms, which was the only place left to write about it.

~ 410 ~

The front page had quietly stopped being a page well before the announcement. The Internet Archive's last successful capture of blog.onet.pl is 1 June 2017, and from that August the address only answers with redirects. They run through the end of 2018. Then, on 5 March 2019, the server starts returning something different.

410 Gone is the status code a server sends when a resource is not missing but finished, and it is set deliberately, by a person who decided that this URL should never resolve again. Onet's analytics payload is still embedded in that page, and its accelerator field is a base64 string, YmxvZy5vbmV0LnBsOjpIVFRQNDEw, which decodes to blog.onet.pl::HTTP410. Somebody at the portal gave the tombstone a name in the tracking system so it could be counted. It is still being served today, to nobody, seven years on.

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