WordPress was b2/cafelog (2004) | Hacker News Reader

WordPress was b2/cafelog (2004)

cafelog.com

57 pointsziodave32 comments

    What is b2 ? 
    A classy news/weblog tool (aka log ware).

Two remarkable things in this statement

1. It's been a long time since people called this "weblogging", so long that most people don't even remember that's where "blog" and "blogging" came from.

2. Trends are really fickle, what is classy one year looks very dated the next, and in a decade or two comes back as retro cool.

3. Fonts used to be unreadably small because we all had 640x480 or 800x600 17-21" monitors at the time, and it wasn't small on those.

640x480 @ 14" is 57 dpi, but Windows, back then, was commonly configured for 96 dpi.

Making fonts tiny was the only way for them not to render huge on the typical end-user device.

1280x1024 on a 17"/19" TFT screen was common in 2004. Your numbers are from a decade before that. Websites were often optimised for minimum width of 800px to cater also old 800x600 CRT screens from last century.

I didn't get an LCD until like 2008 or 2009.

But yeah, I was doing 1280x960 on a 17".

CRTs are bad for your eyes. I replaced all CRTs in my life with LCD in 2001. They got very inexpensive in 2002.

CRTs were very flexible when choosing a screen resolution- 32x200, 800x600, or even 1600x1200 on a 17" - no problem. Today many cheap LCDs look only fine in their native resolution.

I wish we one could still buy 16:10 or even 4:3 LCD monitors nowadays. A ~4K monitor in 4:3 would be awesome.

LCDs had really bad contrast, and IPS wasn't really a thing yet. I just was horribly unimpressed with how bad LCDs looked for the longest time.

Now I'm pining for an impulse driven OLED. True blacks combined with the pixel grid an LCD has, with no persistence of vision issues.

People are still buying 15.6" 1366x768 laptops by the truck load

Remember pixelfonts?

I still use them for white-on-black terminals when I can.

Pixel font != bitmap font. I doubt that you use an all caps retro font for your terminal…

Both terms actually describe the exact same thing. On the other hand them being "retro" and all caps is completely optional.

Back then in the mid 00s the terminology was quite specific, if I remember correctly. After all, "bitmapped" is more about the delivery format, whereas the "pixel" descriptor is more about the visuals (and heck, you could have a vector "pixel" font if you're specific about the sizes and hinting).

Kottke's "Silkscreen" was one of the more popular ones http://kottke.org/plus/type/silkscreen/

I know the term "blog" was being used 2002 or earlier, because my personal site back then had a page "blog.cfm" (though it would be a while before the term was being used in MSM)

What luso_brazilian is calling attention to is not that the term "blog" didn't exist back then, but that the original term "weblog" has since vanished. Nobody nowadays would call WordPress a "weblog tool."

"Pages are generated dynamically from the MySQL database, so no clumsy 'rebuilding' is involved". Funny! Today, static site generators market themselves on the exact opposite pain/benefit perspective.

We used to use terminals into powerful machines, then the personal computer revolution came along, and now everything is back on machines that aren't in your house and we call it the cloud.

Didn't Microsoft fight hard against this trend?

Nowadays, they are all in with their bet on Azure, Windows10-as-service, Office365.

I think that was because back then moveable type was the main competitor (and greymatter!) you had to rebuild your entire blog after you made a new post which was a pain if you had lots of blog posts!

They also used to spam google to pay their costs in the early days

http://waxy.org/2005/03/wordpress_websi/

Now this needs to get more coverage.

Yeah, this unfortunate yet incredibly common abuse pattern from 10 years ago needs more coverage!

I remember trying b2 out early in the development and finding the installation on hosted server space a bit complicated. I had a few gremlins as well about the navigation from article/archive/index pages.

Tried later when it was wordpress and used wp to publish the vanity page from October 2004 to February 2010 my backups tell me. I used MoveableType and Greymatter[2] as well - anyone remember those?

Went back to old school static web pages about 4 or 5 years ago, mainly because I wasn't writing much and keeping the scripts up to date was getting to be a drag...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greymatter_%28software%29

I certainly remember Movable Type, and I think a few well-known blogs are still powered by it: two that spring to mind are Daring Fireball and kottke.org. (Probably a case of "if it works, why change it?".)

We used it at ReadWriteWeb back in the day, too. Can't say it was especially user friendly, but it got the job done.

>> "If you like b2, please rate it at HotScripts.com"

Wow those were the days when I used to browse for php scripts in that site, before sourceforge or github became the hub for open source.

forked by Mullenweg to become WP, more here http://winningwp.com/a-brief-history-of-wordpress/

best part http://winningwp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/W-WordPress-...

(for the horror fans)

Quote from the history article linked above

"The following month, a principal competitor of WordPress, named Movable Type, announced a radical change to their pricing structure, thereby adding significant fuel to the WordPress fire by driving thousands of Moveable Type customers their way."

Yup: I had to move several project sites I was running for my then employer as we had no actual budget (it was a college) and I worked out it would cost several hundreds of pounds a year under the original commercial license. I recollect that six apart later modified their cost structure, but too late we were off.

That quote though. I legit lol-ed.

I used to have a b2 based blog a long time ago.

I remember that there were no updates for a time, and then there was an announcement about there being two forks, WordPress and b2evolution (I think that was the name?).

It's hard to believe it's been so long since then, and WordPress has come a long way since then! Never really kept track of the other fork.

http://web.archive.org/web/20011116202210/http://cafelog.com...

What is b2 ?

>>A news/blog tool.

How does it work ?

>>You log in, you type something and hit "blog this" and in the next second it's on your page(s). Pages are generated dynamically from the MySQL database.

Requirements ?

>>A server that can run PHP4, and a MySQL database.

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