March, 2, 2005 archives

there have been two common responses to my decision to sell blo.gs. the first has just been “why, the hosting costs or the time?” the short answer is the time. while i tossed out the number of $3500 of what the costs of the service have been, it’s good to realize that goes back to november 2002, and includes the original cost of the server that it is running on. cash-flow wise, the service loses about $20 per month (together with this site, since they’re hosted on the same machine and both run google ads). if i keep this server, i’ll actually be spending more on hosting once blo.gs is gone.

but that’s not to say that the site takes a lot of time, either. the only real ongoing maintenance is handling requests to clean up duplicate or bad entries, and dealing with the occassional database hiccup. but it could take a lot of time, and this is where i think the site would be better off without me. i’m just not willing to put in the time to make the site and its services better.

so that brings me to the second common response, which has been offers to host the site while letting me keep control of it. as you might guess from my time vs. money explanation above, that doesn’t do anything to address why it is i’m selling the site. so while i appreciate those offers, they don’t interest me.

i’m sure i’ll have to say more about this later. the response so far has been interesting.

from a blog entry about xfn from david berlind of zdnet: “Web-based RSS aggregation provider Blo.gs is one company that's ahead of the curve in this respect, explicitly providing XFN support in its blogroll generator (I haven't tested it.)” (via tantek çelik.)

okay, there’s a couple of things wrong with that sentence. but i’ll consider it timely press. and the entry is a really good overview of why xfn is cooler than the social networking services.