Long after the flavor’s gone, I’ve decided to turn betips.net over to someone else. This is kind of a hard decison – many hundreds of unpaid hours have gone into the site, and it served as a test-bed for some cool things, like TrackerBase. For a couple of years it was one of very few full-time servers running BeOS on the Internet. These days the site is all PHP/MySQL under OS X, but I haven’t touched the content for ages… just keep it around because it’s nice to have a domain at my fingertips for file transfer, etc. But I’ve got other ideas for that now, and this really should be in the hands of someone who lives and breathes BeOS. Let me know if you’re interested in hosting – shacker at birdhouse org.
(This post has been modified).
I want to know about those other ideas…
Don’t get too excited… I don’t mean to use secrecy to conceal some great brainstorm…
It is always a hard decision to abandon one of ones projects – dormant or not. Kudos therefore for offering betips.net to an interested maintainer; many people wouldn’t have the generosity to do that. I hope you find somebody for the job.
full-time server running BeOS on the Internet
I have to disagree on that one be.siteparc.fr was ruininig on a bebox way before you started betips. Also stegemann.net was also running full time under BeOS.
But hey you’re right this was the first american served BeOS site.
Ludovic, you’re right – there were those two. I did say “one of” but I should have said something like “betips was the only high-profile site running BeOS” or similar, but “high-profile” is a relative term. betips was serving 25,000 – 50,000 requests per day from BeOS, while those sites could not have been getting a fraction of that traffic.
I definitely don’t mean to disparate them in any way – they were great at what they did and they were online as BeOS servers before I was. I’ve modified the post. Thanks.
I felt really bad when I decided to abandon AliveJournal, but the decision was really made for me: I could no longer boot into BeOS after installing some new hardware… Not that I wouldn’t have come to the same decision even if I could boot the OS, but without being able to compile/test the app, not much development can happen.
That, I’m afraid, is one of the big problem with things digital. Nothing lasts. BeTips was incredibly useful in its time. Mm. Perhaps spin the content off as a cdrom .iso and hang that on a website somewhere? With all the content on a BeOS machine one should be able to tracker search the articles, right? Heck, if you’re feeling generous, you could include the scripts that made the BeOS Betips go.
It’s sad to see BeOS growing cold, but not, I think, as sad as some of the grim, nasty behavior you might see in the Apple II world if you look. Like most politics, they get the most vicious when the stakes are lowest. Perhaps it’s better this way. The people move on and do other things, the bits… they go by the wayside.
-Jim
Hey Jim –
Not to worry – remember, i was asking for someone to take it over, not saying I would abandon it without a new host. I’ve already got two parties interested in taking over the domain, so I’m sure the transition will go fine.
I’d be interested in hosting that Content of Betips.
My hosting allows for unlimited bandwidth.
I am proficient in PHP/MySQL as well.
I’m also an OBOS Team Leader.