Frassle’s Back
After a few weeks of downtime, Shimon put Frassle back online.
I love Frassle. If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you know that.
I’d been so busy in the fall, I hadn’t had much time to work on it or read some of the Frassle blogs. Seeing the note on the front page that Shimon has decided not to actively develop it anymore breaks my heart. I think it had a lot of promise. Shimon was trying to do some exciting and unique things with it, like having a robust hierarchical structure, offering a way to link similar feeds, and including a sophisticated aggregator. Maybe when he gets bored in a year or two, he’ll come back to it. Or, since it’s open source, maybe someone out there will build on it. (If you do, let me know ’cause I’d still love to help.)
Frassle is also a valuable lesson in knowing about the host of a blog platform. Because I knew Shimon before I started playing with Frassle, I knew what it was all about. I wonder how many Frassle users didn’t know what they were getting into, didn’t know it’s, well, some guy’s grand experiment, so to speak, and how many are really upset by his announcement that it’s going to stagnate.
One of the big problems with blogs is that content is not easily exported and imported. It’s not like we can take our toys and go play elsewhere without a lot of trouble. Blog content is often embedded in the system. Many of us hope blog developers will fix this problem, but that may not happen any time soon. Like some wireless phones only working on certain networks, some companies might deliberately do that to try to lock users in.
I guess I should remove the link to the Frassle mirror of this blog since it no longer exists. Shimon said the aggregator’s going to be permanently offline. I kinda liked knowing there was a Frassle incarnation of this blog. We’d even talked once or twice about me moving the scratchpad to Frassle permanently. Now, I definitely won’t do it.
At any rate, go read some Frassle blogs now that they’re back. Thanks, Shimon, for all your work on Frassle. I still think it’s fabulous, even if it’s not going much further.
