Nolblog

» see nolblog.hu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

A blog platform written in Hungarian and run by a Budapest newspaper, read almost entirely by that newspaper's own subscribers, is about as sealed as a national internet gets. Budapest is two hours from Istanbul by plane and the language is a wall. I can read the archive and the shutdown notices. I could not have read a single post on the site while it was up.

Nolblog came out of the first wave of Hungarian blog hosts, around 2004, alongside Freeblog and Blogter. It belonged to Népszabadság, the largest leftist daily in the country, and it ran as the blog arm of that paper's website. The earliest copy anyone kept is from 2 April 2006, in the middle of a national election campaign, and it shows a mature platform. There is a catalog of blogs and a most-read ranking, and the front page is given over to political diaries with names like Diurnus and Orbinator Viktor.

It stayed that size. In January 2016 it still hosted more than three thousand blogs, which in Hungarian terms is a real community and in commercial terms is nothing. There were no ads on it. The people writing there skewed old and knew each other well enough to argue hard, which meant the administrators kept having to step in.

~ the dossier ~

~ the eight hours ~

On 31 December 2015 the publisher, Mworks Print Zrt, announced that nolblog.hu would be discontinued on 31 January 2016. That date passed quietly. The site was cut off at 00:28 CET on 1 February, which is the sort of hour a scheduled job runs at rather than a person.

Then it came back. About eight hours later nolblog was serving again, and it kept serving through the rest of that day. It was finally shut down on the afternoon of 2 February. No announcement covered the return, so the likeliest reading is that somebody noticed the job had fired and put it back while the last exports finished.

~ what was saved and what was not ~

The platform did offer an export, and the files it produced could be imported into other blogging services, so the writers who wanted to move had a path. An archivist working as bzc6p pulled the whole site into WARC files that now sit on the Internet Archive. There is one gap in that copy and it was deliberate. In the final days a number of users deleted all their own articles rather than let them be preserved, so the archive holds their blogs with nothing inside.

The subdomains were the part that died. nolblog.hu itself had always redirected to a section of the paper's main site, and that section was rebuilt to show posts from the most popular former users, who kept writing. Everyone else was simply cut off.

~ nine months later ~

Mediaworks had done this before. It closed NolTV, the paper's own video host, on 30 June 2015, on the reasoning that the newsroom had been putting its videos on YouTube anyway. Nolblog went seven months after that, with no reason given at all.

On 8 October 2016 the same company suspended Népszabadság entirely, print and online, saying the business model was unsustainable and that operations would stop until a new form could be decided. Every article was deleted from the website that day and the front page was replaced with a press release. The decision was read across Hungary and abroad as political rather than commercial, since the paper had spent that year publishing on government expenses. The blogs had gone first, in February, and at the time that had looked like nothing more than a publisher trimming a cost line.

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