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A submission from an AC prompted the following.
Pipedot (https://pipedot.org/) was another reaction to Slashdot Beta but didn't get going as quickly as SN. Nevertheless Bryan, the owner, created a useful site with nice features like the "Feed" page for RSS reading.
Last Thursday Aug 15, the site started sending out 502 codes in response to any attempts at access and it remained like that for a short while. We have seen no explanation regarding the outage. However, at the time of this story's writing, the site is back online again.
Pipedot is not currently accepting new stories and hasn't published one since 2017, but it hasn't gone away. Those running the site believe that it didn't justify the level of effort to keep pushing out stories when they were really competing with other Slashdot alternatives, including ourselves. But, recognising that things can change, the site is still 'live' and ready to go if needed. It provides a very useful RSS feed which is available for anyone to use and it provides a lot of useful material for potential submissions.
We have a good and friendly relationship with Pipedot and we are very happy to cooperate with them, especially as we did in the first year or two after Slashdot Beta. It is also reassuring to know that, if something unexpected happens to our own site, it would only be a matter of days before an alternative site could be up and running. We are pleased to discover that last weeks event was only a temporary blip and not a sign that Pipedot was going away. We wish them every success for the future.
(Score: 5, Informative) by bryan on Monday August 19 2019, @06:13PM (5 children)
RSS feeds from other sites. I experimented with a "Homepage" similar to the defunct iGoogle [wikipedia.org] or ad-supported Protopage [wikipedia.org] where you can show a compact view of a dozen or so of your favorite feeds on one page. Then I tried a "Reader" interface similar to the also defunct Google Reader [wikipedia.org] but I never really optimized the database accesses (so the interface is unfortunately rather slow.)
As an example, my homepage currently shows the most recent articles on the news sites I like to visit. Or I can browse all their articles on the site, such as the feeds for Anandtech [pipedot.org] and Ars Technica [pipedot.org].
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Monday August 19 2019, @06:52PM (4 children)
What about Feedly [feedly.com]?
That's what I use to keep track of SoylentNews, comics, and various other news sites and blogs.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bryan on Monday August 19 2019, @08:56PM (3 children)
Indeed, I did briefly use Protopage to replace iGoogle and Feedly to replace Google Reader. Wikipedia even has a list of feed aggregators [wikipedia.org] to choose from. But many of them, including Feedly, are non-free software. If you navigate to feedly.com with JavaScript turned off, you'll get a perfectly blank page. Protopage plastered ads on my homepage that adblock/noscript couldn't fully block.
I'm a developer, and I saw an itch to scratch. I wanted a site that was free-software, that worked without JavaScript, did not have any ads, and that I could expand as I pleased.
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Monday August 19 2019, @10:52PM (2 children)
Glad to see your still around Bryan!
I check on the pipe at least once a month hoping to see a stir of life.
Glad to see it has not gone quietly into the night.
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 20 2019, @12:41AM (1 child)
Did you mean go gentle into that good night?
(Score: 2) by Pslytely Psycho on Wednesday August 21 2019, @06:12AM
Nah, just keeping the grand tradition of mangling quotes alive!
(:
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.