Rethinking sourstock.com
Sat, 06 Dec 2008
I hate to abandon any project to which I’ve dedicated serious time and effort. I created sourstock.com as a way to showcase the talent and diversity of Florida’s online content providers. This is still a worthy cause, but the tools I chose to accomplish my goal are insufficient to the task.
I’ve decided to halt any regular update of feeds at sourstock.com. I’ll leave the current site up for now, but will likely shutter it after the holidays.
Florida blogs deserve a community: I’d hoped to provide a platform that could bring all that content together into a searchable, categorized and tagged index. I built sourstock.com upon open source software and that project’s development is stalled indefinitely. I really like gregrarius, but I don’t think it can serve my current needs. While gregarius offers unparalleled features, it hasn’t scaled well.
As the index grew from a few hundred blogs to more than a thousand, performance of sourstock.com became an issue. Categories and tags were disabled in order to keep the site responsive. I pruned years of stored posts from the index, trying to streamline a massively bloated database.
I’ve worked hard to keep the index limping along as a service to fellow Floridians, but I must find a simpler solution, one requiring less effort to maintain. I never saw a business model in the venture: No advertising ever ran on the site, out of respect for the content providers I showcased. I’m out-of-pocket a few dollars for domain registration, but beyond that, sourstock.com cost me nothing but my time.
I’m done nursing a broken aggregator. I’d prefer to rethink the concept without regard to the limitations evinced in the current implementation. I’m fairly sure that I’ll scrap the current code and feature-set. What will replace the site is yet to be determined.
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