Running Weblogs with Slash

Chapter 1. Slash: An Overview

This chapter is a whirlwind tour of Slash. It begins with a short history of Slash, then explores a typical site through the eyes of an average user. It explains the life cycle of a Slash Story, from user submission to published glory, and ends with a skeletal view of the underlying software. Subsequent chapters put meat on these bones. This chapter draws the broad outlines of the map and the major thoroughfares.

The Slashdot Story

The Slash Story begins with Slashdot, one of the most successful news and technology sites on the web. Slashdot’s motto says it all: “News for nerds. Stuff that matters.” Back in 1997, Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda started a website known as Chips & Dips, served from his student account at Hope College in Michigan. That summer, Malda spent his time writing and updating static HTML files. Every few days, he’d start a new page. Computer programmers like to talk about scalability, the idea that a resource can keep up with increasing demands. Editing HTML by hand is time-consuming and tedious, and quickly scales beyond the attention span of a typical programmer. Computers are fully capable of handling these mundanities.

The site grew in popularity. Malda and his friend Jeff “Hemos” Bates registered the slashdot.org domain and moved to a dedicated machine in October 1997. They took the opportunity to automate parts of the publishing process. Malda started learning Perl and enlisted the help of other friends (Patrick Galbraith, Cliff ...