Blogstalk Second Anniversary
Fri Mar 18, 2011 3:09:21 pm

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In November of 2008, I was seriously contemplating the possibility of creating an alternative to OKCupid. The site was full of bugs and was declining in function. It was clear that code updates were not sufficiently tested, and many updates were completely unnecessary. Some updates involved the intentional removal of functionality. The most notable ones were the removable of image comments and tables. I liked the general concept of the site, but I hated the implementation of it, and it was getting worse. I knew that I could make something better.

I had decided that blogstalk should focus exclusively on the blogs. I avoided making this a dating site, because the other major problem with okcupid is that many people left when they found love, because they felt it was wrong to stay on a "dating site". I didn't want that to happen here.

I wrote a bit of code in November and stopped for a while due to excessive amounts of paid work. I resumed again in January and had most of the basic functions completed by February. On March 17, 2009, I was ready for beta testing. I sent out some private messages to my e-friends to let them know about my project. This message included a request to not tell anyone about this. I was using a small test server that could not handle a large influx of members, and I didn't want to deal with the headache of hundreds of complaints for the same problem. The system still needed significant testing before I was ready for it to be public.

On March 18, Ren joined and made a post. That was the official birth of blogstalk.