Organizine Closing Doors already?

January 9, 2001 6:55 AM

Organizine Closing Doors already? Organizine is shutting down services at 5pm PST. Well, at least I found out with a few hours to go (!)... time to move all content out then.
posted by williamtry (42 comments total)

Bad link, or did they already shut down? I can't get to it.
posted by pnevares at 6:57 AM on January 9, 2001

Sorry.. that has one extra / in the link.. proper link is here.
Perhaps Matt could edit the link in the title post please?

Sorry... typing incompetence on my part.
posted by williamtry at 7:01 AM on January 9, 2001

Wow. When the only two items on your news page are "Welcome!" and "Sorry," something has gone horribly awry. What the Heck Ramsey happened?
posted by solistrato at 7:16 AM on January 9, 2001

"mistakes were made"
posted by palegirl at 7:18 AM on January 9, 2001

Oy. WTF? I'd barely begun reading the FAQ, was considering trying it out this weekend. Not me, but I imagine Adam's real users, deserve slightly more of an explanation.
posted by dhartung at 7:42 AM on January 9, 2001

Well, let me explain my use... I maintain my school's website (as I have done it since 1996), and to ease the load when people come to me saying "just put this online", "can you just slip this onto the site", I was about to use Organizine to allow secretaries and staff at school to post articles without me having to do it. Literally, the new system was due to be uploaded this evening. Now that's out of the question.I'll have to find an alternative.
posted by williamtry at 7:50 AM on January 9, 2001

There are comments in the html of BlueBlog. Here's one:

yes, i'm shutting Organizine down
20-year-olds shouldn't be worrying about debugging and supporting web applications


posted by Foaf at 8:03 AM on January 9, 2001

And another comment from four days ago:

you know, if blogger wasn't using such inferior microsoft technology...
i mean, really, ms sql server + iis + millions of records + 80,000 users = recipe for disaster
maybe this wouldn't such a problem

Guess he had problems of his own...
posted by xiffix at 8:37 AM on January 9, 2001

Short attention span theater comes to the web. . . again.

Those comments are hilarious, by the way. Everyone should write clever comments--add a whole new layer of content (and inconvenience) to the web.
posted by rodii at 8:39 AM on January 9, 2001

I'm sorry about this. Organizine seemed to have many of the features I was looking for. Building your own attributes seemed really to be the way one could make a template that included daily images with ease. I tried to twist and turn blogger to do that but it wasn't easy.

Blogger buy up some of these feature sets!
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 8:41 AM on January 9, 2001

Everyone should write clever comments--add a whole new layer of content (and inconvenience) to the web.

almost everybody does!


posted by palegirl at 8:46 AM on January 9, 2001

williamtry - you might take a look at groksoup for your school site. I haven't played with it yet but it looks very easy to use, if less customizable than Organizine, Blogger, Greymatter et. al.
posted by Tubes at 9:45 AM on January 9, 2001

FWIW, the Blogger framework and API is written in Java and runs on Linux, so while one might like to blame the scaling issues on Microsoft, it's just not that simple.
posted by megnut at 10:01 AM on January 9, 2001

success is a bitch, eh?

although to be honest, i don't understand the comparison i'm seeing, here or elsewhere, between blogger and organizine. yes, they're both web-based publishing applications, but they serve (or, well, served) two fairly different publishing purposes. it's a class apples vs. oranges argument -- ok, they're both fruit, but that's about as far as the comparison goes, and what was your point, exactly? there are better ways to construct an argument than around a straw man.

i, for one, am sorry to see organizine go, as i had been sort of planning my monstro! redesign around it. ah, well. them's the breaks.
posted by monstro at 11:49 AM on January 9, 2001

What's everyone's opinion of greymatter? I actually like it. Don't know if I'll stick with it, but so far it's fun.
posted by tiaka at 11:52 AM on January 9, 2001

You know, blabbing to everyone about source code comments just takes all the fun out of it.
posted by adam at 12:40 PM on January 9, 2001

I plan to play with greymatter if for no other reason than because I can get into the innards and see what's going on. Perhaps it'll finally inspire me to learn enough perl to roll some of my own content-management tools.
posted by harmful at 2:09 PM on January 9, 2001

[megnut] FWIW, the Blogger framework and API is written in Java and runs on Linux, so while one might like to blame the scaling issues on Microsoft, it's just not that simple.

Ah, so we can blame the scaling issues on Sun and Linus Torvalds, then? :)

posted by daveadams at 2:24 PM on January 9, 2001

Bugger. Wish I'd got around to starting my episode guide to "Prurient Gentleman Intrudes" now. Organizine was exactly the answer to what i wanted when it came along. I just don't what to say. I'm somewhere between "well, thems the breaks" and "fuck you" at the moment.
posted by davidgentle at 3:17 PM on January 9, 2001

"fuck you" ?

Would you care to explain exactly why you have any right to be bitter about Adam's decision to shut down this service he offered as a hobby?

You should be thanking him right now. Not because he wrote a cool app, but because he closed it down now instead waiting until you were really invested in it.

Because it is all about you, isnt it?
posted by bryanboyer at 3:32 PM on January 9, 2001

More HTML fun:

note to self: stop writing source code commentsstupid mefi people

posted by aaron at 4:06 PM on January 9, 2001

What we need is a bookmarklet that removes comment tags. Any javascript wizards out there? (Or have I missed it?)
posted by daveadams at 4:52 PM on January 9, 2001

Another comment also found in the source code...

"I'm starting to think maybe it was just a really horrible idea."

"Why?"

"I just don't think I can deal with all the responsibility."

"What do you have to do?"

"Well, nothing really, the site pretty much runs itself. But responsibility, bad, you know. I think maybe the whole thing itself, is a bad idea."

"Shit man, I could've told you that."

"Well, why didn't you or anyone else tell me it was such a stupid idea?"

"Because you came up with it. It's obvious that it has to be a stupid idea."

posted by Brilliantcrank at 4:54 PM on January 9, 2001

I was excited when I read about this in xblog and surprised to see it fold so soon. Adam is you didn't want all the responsibility then why not ask the community to help you maintain it? Seems there are enough people in MeFi to help out.
posted by Brilliantcrank at 4:55 PM on January 9, 2001

There's an apology of sorts at trenchant.org. Any chance the source for organizine will be released?
posted by jed at 5:39 PM on January 9, 2001

I wonder how many of the people complaining have spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours' worth of their life on a product which they're offering to the world for free.
posted by Noah at 5:56 PM on January 9, 2001

I don't think Organizine is the problem...I think it's more that Adam wants to take some personal time away from the Internet, the computer, etc, and acutally enjoy college/life for a bit.

BTW, Noah, even though greymatter is cool try not to linky-link to your own stuff.
posted by rlef98 at 6:47 PM on January 9, 2001

Maybe Adam can open source it and let people who have their own servers and "organizine projects" in the works use the app on their own servers?


posted by tamim at 6:57 PM on January 9, 2001

I personally spent years maintaining a website for an international organization of disparate clubs, back when the internet was still something you had to explain to people. I shut my site down over two years ago, but I still maintain a META REFRESH tag to up-to-date resources for those who run into it by accident.

In any case, tamim is correct: this is a perfect application for open source. It seems that there is plenty of interest, and I don't doubt that the depth is there. If indeed organizine offered something unique, I encourage Adam to consider that route, either as a project manager, or by turning it all over.

The most annoying thing about the web is the abrupt disappearance of resources. The deep irony is that many of them would find willing new responsible parties, if only given the chance.
posted by dhartung at 8:45 PM on January 9, 2001

bryanboyer: Here's what I actually said;
I'm somewhere between "well, thems the breaks" and "fuck you" at the moment.
My point being that I have mixed feelings. I wasn't actually saying "fuck you" to him. But if I did say that it would be because I have been using it for months (since September) and helped beta test it. I spent a fair amount of my time coming up with suggestions for new features and sending the occasional bug report. It's very frustrating to spend time on something and then have it disappear, particularly when it had just gone public.

posted by davidgentle at 9:55 PM on January 9, 2001

> I wasn't actually saying "fuck you" to him.

Then who, pray tell, are you directing it at? The "you" in fuck you usually refers to a person.

Adam made an amazing thing that could have taken over his life in a very short time. Even if he wrote all over the site "this app is as-is, no guarantees, no support" I know he would be hounded for new features and bizarre bugs nonstop.

I don't see his actions as being selfish. They're sensible. When I was 20 all I did was study, go to class, and work crappy jobs. I didn't even have a computer until I went to grad school. If I built something like organizine (even today, at age 28), I'd be freaked about deleting database tables accidentally and losing someone's content, or breaking a script and hosing the site.

Doing it for free means all the pressure and no payback for all your time. Doing it for money means even more work, because people expect even more in terms of support. Either way, I could never see myself doing a side-project of that nature, or even wanting to.
posted by mathowie at 10:56 PM on January 9, 2001

btw, rlef98, it's perfectly fine to self-link on a comment, but not as a thread starter. I thought that was pretty clear, but I suppose I should make it more obvious in the guidelines.
posted by mathowie at 11:14 PM on January 9, 2001

mat: I don't think you understand what I was saying. The "you" in "fuck you" would have been aimed at Adam IF THAT WAS WHAT I WAS SAYING. Sorry to shout. I was trying to say that I had mixed emotions. I guess I should have used the phrase "mixed emotions".
And I didn't "hound" him. I was a BETA TESTER. That is the job. I politely asked him if he could put in some functionality that I thought would be useful (and he apparently agreed with one of my ideas and implemented it). I realise that what he did was cool. That's why I'm sad to see it go.
posted by davidgentle at 11:28 PM on January 9, 2001

David, maybe you meant just a general yelling of the word "fuck!" as opposed to adding the "you" after it.

And I never said nor meant that you were houding Adam, just that if organizine really got off the ground, many users would start hounding him. Take a look at Blogger. It's a free product and there's a discussion board filled with thousands of questions and answers. Support is easier when it's part of your job, but when it's a hobby, it's much different.
posted by mathowie at 12:49 AM on January 10, 2001

I can certainly understand Adam not wanting to Open Source his project, especially if he hopes to take another crack at it somewhere down the line. Still, I wonder if he would consider placing his problem child into the care of someone else who would be willing to commit to the time and effort maintaining such a project would require, under some sort of terms that would let Adam hold onto rights. I know I'm not serious enough to take on that responsibility, and I doubt that most of the people bemoaning the loss of this toy are, either. I certainly wouldn't want Adam to hand Organizine over to someone who wasn't willing to make an effort to convince him that they could give his baby a new home.
posted by harmful at 6:37 AM on January 10, 2001

Could someone post the URL for Greymatter? I'm interested in taking a look.

Going to http://www.graymatter.com either is going in the wrong direction or I'm missing the app.

Thanks.
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 8:03 AM on January 10, 2001

Noah already did, but here's another link; it's just a sub-site of his homepage.
posted by harmful at 8:09 AM on January 10, 2001

For those interested in (and capable of) helping put together a community-built Organizine-like application, Nathaniel Haas is trying to orgainze something.

mod_perl skills, sysadmins, and bandwidth owners are specifically mentioned as needed.
posted by cCranium at 9:35 AM on January 10, 2001

Hey if anyone has spare mod_perl skills, sysadmin skills and bandwidth, I have a few projects they can do for me while they're at it. Thanks guys, I'll send you a spec, let me know when you're done!
posted by beefula at 9:34 PM on January 10, 2001

Thanks for the link, harmful.
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 7:17 AM on January 11, 2001

Beefula, I'm not sure if that was a joke or not, but you have heard of open source software, right?

It's not like Nathaniel's trying to create some big business or anything, he saw a useful product that can obviously be done not be available. Rather than only complain about the fact that he's not going to be able to use organizine anymore, he's decided that it has the likelyhood of being a tremendously useful community software.

Obviously one person can't dedicate themselves to it, and sidewise compliments to Adam for seeing that and having the balls to act on it right away. Nathaniel's trying to find a solution that gets around that burden of responsibility.

It's a fairly common practice online you know. See a problem, see a solution, implement the solution with others.
posted by cCranium at 8:21 AM on January 11, 2001