Blogsome

» see blogsome.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Blogsome.com is serving a page right now that invites you to create a blog in two easy steps. The button under it points at a file called signup.html, and that file says one thing: blog creation has been disabled indefinitely. The front page has never been edited to match. It still lists the features and still promises you can get blogging in minutes, down to the same misspelling of personalize it was carrying in 2005.

The service was a free blog host built on WordPress, handing out yourname.blogsome.com to anyone who asked. Its earliest capture is 27 November 2004, and the front page then was a joke: four numbered dictionary definitions of the invented word blogsome, ending with blogs o' me. Underneath the joke was a real offer that almost nobody else was making in 2004, which was hosted WordPress that you did not have to install or pay for.

That timing is the whole story of why it existed. WordPress.com did not open until late 2005, so for about a year Blogsome was one of the few places a person could have a WordPress blog without renting hosting and running the installer themselves. Once Automattic was doing the same thing with a company and a business model behind it, the reason to be on a third-party host thinned out every year.

The 2005 front page carried a live column of the twenty most recent posts across the entire service, which makes it a census of who was actually there. Reading it now, the titles are Spanish, Chinese, Finnish, Indonesian and English. There is no Turkish on the list. That is the answer to why a free WordPress host with an English-language in-joke on its front door was never anywhere near my orbit: the free-blog layer in Turkey had its own front doors that decade, and the language of the signup page decided which one you walked through.

~ the dossier ~

~ before wordpress.com ~

Free blog hosting in 2004 mostly meant Blogger, which was Google's by then, or one of the LiveJournal-shaped communities. What WordPress had that those did not was a plugin system and a database you could get your posts back out of, and what it did not have was anybody offering it as a service. Blogsome sat in that gap and grew fast enough to describe itself, on its own front page, as the fastest growing blog host in the world, with a parenthetical admitting this was in percentage terms.

The tradeoff was the one every free host makes. You got a subdomain rather than a domain and a support forum rather than support, on an arrangement that was only ever as durable as whoever was paying for the servers. For a few years that was a good deal, because the alternative was learning what a MySQL database was before you had written a single post.

~ blog creation has been disabled ~

The ending went out privately. In late November 2011 users started posting elsewhere that they had received an email saying Blogsome was closing down permanently and that the administration interface would not be reachable after 7 December, with an instruction to export everything from the backup tab before then. There was no announcement post and no notice anywhere on the public site. Anyone who did not read that email in time lost the archive.

What is left is stranger than an empty domain. Every subdomain now resolves to the same front page, so a blog address that used to be somebody's writing answers with a signup form for a service that closed fifteen years ago. Somebody is still paying for the hosting, because at some point an affiliate link to a blogging tutorial site was added to the navigation. The page went through a stretch as a registrar parking page around 2015 and then came back to the 2005 design, typo intact, which suggests whoever holds it now went to the archive and put the original file back.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »