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Exactly one year ago SoylentNews published its very first story: Welcome to SoylentNews!
And what a year it's been!
It all started with a posting at slashdot where an editor claimed they had "listened to their audience" about complaints about the new Beta version of the site that was being rolled out. Many noted that any changes were cosmetic — that it was the community that made that site what it was. And, in inimical nerd fashion, a "SlashCott" was scheduled from February 10-17 wherein the participants pledged to not visit /. for one whole week.
Others took a more active role. The source code for /. was originally made open source and was available on the internet. Sadly, that code had not been maintained and was several years out of date. Some intrepid souls labored long and hard to locate servers, coordinate activities, and get the code knocked into shape. The goal was to create an alternative site that was free from the manipulations of a corporate overlord.
That first story signified a major accomplishment, but the site was still unstable and many features were incomplete, non-functional, or just plain ugly. Many more days of implementation, debugging, and testing were to follow culminating with SN going live to the world on February 17, 2014: Welcome to the World of Tomorrow... Today!.
Much has happened since that nascent story first graced the 'net. There have been changes in our all-volunteer staff. We had votes for the name of the site. We implemented UTF-8 support so stories and comments can include any valid character. We incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation — on USA's Independence Day no less! We have an on-line store where you can buy SoylentNews Swag. You can subscribe and help support our site.
By the numbers: Over 5000 accounts have been registered and nearly 5000 stories have been posted to the site. Each story is read from 500-2000 times by logged-in users, and approximately 10 times as many Anonymous Cowards. More importantly, nearly 150,000 comments have been posted by you, our community.
Today, we have a small but dedicated group of volunteers who keep the site running. They keep the OS up-to-date on our servers, maintain our Wiki, e-mail, and IRC channels. They add features and fix bugs in the SN code base. Others edit and publish stories to appear on the site. We have a Board of Directors who take care of the legal sides of things. A treasurer who follows the finances. And there are still others who help in a non-technical, but just as necessary capacity in keeping the site humming along.
So, hats off to all who have helped build this site to what it is today!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DarkMorph on Friday February 13 2015, @02:30AM
Glad to see the movement was successful, despite the drama seeping out of every nook on the front page and in IRC in the early months, including the debate over domain name ownership and such. Glad to see a "primitive" web page design is perfectly usable and suitable despite the era we're in and what web tech has evolved into. It felt odd at first to abandon /. at the drop of a hat but it was not even two weeks until it felt natural to come to SN for news. Thanks to the creation of this community, I was inspired to give Ars Technica a chance to capture my readership, and now I loyally follow that and this website via RSS to make sure I never miss an article.
Thanks for all the hard work to get the Perl code up to speed, organising everyone who contributed to make this happen and keep it afloat. Thanks to the audience for participating and everyone who pitches in with money, code, or just general chatter. SN turned out better than a lot of people expected, particularly after its first annual anniversary. Congratulations staff for making it this far, and keep up the good work!