I was cleaning out an old server that's been running since 2003.
I finally did the work to move the apps that were running on it to other servers. And I started an EC2 instance to run Frontier so I could keep running some old Manila sites. It's much cheaper, and it gave me an opportunity to at least scan what was there. I'm always too busy to look back.
Anyway, as I was about to wipe the hard drive on the old server, I saw a file called zOutlines.zip and decided to take a look inside. What I found were OPML archives of Scripting News going back as far as April 1, 1997, through February 2006. I must have started another project around then.
I remember what this was for, a project I called Channel Z. The idea was to make blogging more modular, and provide lots of opportunity for cross-tabulation. Back then each blog post was more like a tweet is today. A short bit that links to other places on the web. There was an occasional longer piece, that would just appear as a headline with subs, much the way you add an item to a menu in Fargo today.
Most of the ideas we use in Fargo now existed then, but they ran on Windows and Mac, not on Linux as our back-end does today. We've moved a lot of stuff around, and there are some big new ideas in Fargo, but most of it was invented long-ago.
Before this, if you had asked me where the source archive for Scripting News was, I'd say it's on my hard drive somewhere, but I have no idea where. Maybe it was only on my server? It's possible. But I have it back now, and I've linked to the archive from this post. So it shouldn't be that lost again.
Maybe we can do something interesting with it with Fargo? It breathes OPML too. Maybe, when I have the time.
PS: I wrote an epitaph for Channel Z, if you want to find out what happened.