On the heels of our post celebrating 4,383 days online (that’s 12 internet years!), I want to let everyone know that we’ll be importing key posts into Dachis Group’s Collaboratory blog, and we’ll continue publishing our thoughts and work on visual thinking there. In fact, my first post went up yesterday and other XPLANE alumnus have started blogging there as well.

We won’t be transferring all 8,333 xBlog posts. So many of them are outdated and linkrotted. But we will make sure key posts redirect to their new homes on the Collaboratory and all other posts don’t 404.

It has been a wonderful, amazing, enlightening ride here at xBlog, from hand-coding it starting in 1999, to embracing the first release of WordPress .7 in 2003, to today — a world where blogs are more than commonplace — they are ubiquitous. I don’t know that I could give a better rundown than I did for last year’s 11th anniversary, so if you want a trip down xBlog’s memory lane you can read it here.

Blogging has been core to me and XPLANE for a long time and we’re not going to stop. I truly hope XPLANE’s fans and xBlog’s readers will continue to follow our work as Dachis Group. We’ll still be doing that visual thinking thing, just as we have been for all these years, only now we’ll be bringing to it many more people and businesses.

So on behalf of xBlog… so long, and thanks for all the links.

See you at the Collaboratory.

Cheers,
Bill Keaggy
November 19, 2011

Those were some wildly fun days at XPLANE and in the nascent blog world back then (they still are, but we’re all much more grown up now, and those worlds have gotten so much bigger than we could have imagined).

I started xBlog as an internal resource for the folks at XPLANE. As the “web guy” back then, I was sort of like the in-house “Seen it” version of Anil Dash. If someone said they needed to draw Singapore’s flag, I sent them a link. If someone wanted to find an Isotype library, they asked me. And so on. So I started saving and sorting those links, and soon released it to the world as xBlog | The visual thinking weblog.

I’d been reading Kottke and peterme and CamWorld and Mr. Pants and BradLands and Obscure Store for what seemed like forever, and had been wanting to launch a weblog since well before Peter upchucked that (in)famous little info tidbit.

So, with a Mac, a copy of Fetch, a text editor, a browser, and some help from my buddy Jeff Lash, I FTPd and bunch of HTML files to a server and launched xBlog on November 7, 1999.

xBlog as it looked in 1999 when it first launched. The design was used until 2001.

Gratifyingly, it pretty much was an immediate hit with designers (well, with the designers that weren’t ignoring the internet). How ridiculous is it that in September 2000 xBlog was ranked the 32nd most-linked blog in the world?

Ahead. Of. Zeldman.

Totally ridiculous!

Anyway, I went to SXSW in 2000 and thanked Ev and the Blogger crew for the work they were doing. I still have the t-shirt I got at the blogging panel. Since then, so many amazing people have done so many amazing things using Blogger and the variety of other tools that came around. Blogs have been glorified, vilified, debated, loved, abused and studied. No one can argue whether or not they’re here to stay anymore.

Anyway. I started xBlog as a hand-coded linkblog and it seems I stuck to my guns in that respect more defiantly than I have with anything. I linkblogged my way through the 2000 election, the dotcom crash, September 11, the Columbia space shuttle disaster, the Indonesian tsunami, Katrina and the U.S. housing crisis. I linkblogged through Enron, Google’s IPO, and the iPod, iPhone and iPad. I linkblogged through Iraq and Obama and Facebook and Twitter. I was committed to linkblogging. I even updated xBlog by hand until switching to WordPress in 2003.

Linkblogging made sense back then. And it made sense for a long time after that because it helped make sense of the incredible amount of info out there on the web. But for a while now I’ve been itching to open it up and do something new. So XPLANE has slowly and quietly started publishing original content here at xBlog — and not just from me. We’re beginning a new xBlog (the 7th iteration, if you’re just counting redesigns) and it’s an experiment I’m pretty excited about. There’s no shortage of original content out there, but we’ve got something special going at XPLANE and it’s way past due to get the same special thing going on xBlog.

The funny thing is that linkblogging has already made a comeback. The Design Notes link drops are awesome. Andy Baio’s Links page has been a must-read for years. Delicious and Tumblr and Posterous basically facilitate the linkblogging approach, so its not surprising that today there are thousands of other niche examples out there.

But we’re moving on. I’ve incorporated the old bBlog into xBlog, reorganized the categories and have been encouraging XPLANERS to contribute. We’re just getting started but it feels good to wipe the dust from the /xblog/ directory and really get things rolling again.

Thanks to everyone who read xBlog during its first 11 years. This next year is going to be interesting and I hope you come back every now and then to see how we’re doing.

Cheers,
Bill Keaggy
November 7, 2010

Dave is the founder and president of XPLANE:

I’m a project guy. As an artist, entrepreneur, educator and amateur philosopher, I always have a number of projects going, both personal and professional. Sometimes they go somewhere, sometimes I get bored and abandon them. One of the beauties of the internet is that even abandoned projects continue to exist and can be picked up or reenergized at any moment. Here’s the definitive list of projects that I am working on or have worked on in the past (A work in progress). The list is alphabetical because I don’t work on these projects in any kind of linear way. They are like a busy kitchen: there is always something simmering, something boiling, something set aside to cool for awhile, something in the deep freeze, and something being served. In fact I am still working on this list. If you see something with no explanation it’s because I haven’t finished writing the description yet :)

The official WordPress blog posted up a nice sneak peek into the WordPress 2.5 release, and intriguingly enough, most of it seems to be an interface update thanks to the fine folks from Happy Cog. Excitedly, I grabbed the release candidate and installed it on my laptop to play with. While the experience was primarily positive, there were some things that irked me. This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, but the ones that I felt most passionate about are here.”

It turned out that this change — pointing to lesser-known sites like History of the Button, Buzzfeed, and Indexed — was a rather auspicious. Within 24 hours of releasing the list, seven of the top ten links on Del.icio.us’ typically-tech-centric hotlist were sites on my list. And so in the spirit of celebrating the lesser-known, it’s time again to point toward the best blogs that might have flown under your radar. Here they are, the Best Blogs of 2007 that You Maybe Aren’t Reading…”