cross posted from PluggedOut
I have just uploaded the “work in progress” ThoughtCafe website to the internet.
ThoughtCafe is a website for amateur writers to post their work, and to give and receive feedback. Although this incarnation is new, the site has existed in the past.
In early 2000, while learning about new web technologies such as ASP and PHP, I built a simple website for people to post stories to - that site become “ThoughtCafe”. The first version was built using ASP (or “ASP Classic” as it is now know), and taught me many lessons. Perhaps the most important lesson was that ASP websites - when put under stress - do well to last a week without crashing.
By 2001 the Linux domination of web hosting was in full flow, and version 4 of the PHP scripting language had been released. I saw the desperately needed re-development of the ThoughtCafe website as a perfect reason to learn how to develop on the “LAMP” (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) platform, and dove in. I bought the O’Reilly books, and spent several weeks creating the new site. I ended up with perhaps the most fully featured writing website on the internet, and the visitors came in their thousands.
Visitors of course meant bandwidth, and this was before the days of Google Adsense to offset your hosting fees. We implemented paid memberships to cover costs, and for several years the site flowered. A wonderful community atmosphere grew up among the membership, with many becoming successful published authors - standing on each others shoulders to learn, and to improve each other’s skills. We ran monthly online writing workshops and even sent out a newsletter to the thousands of members with news about the site, writing events, and special interest articles.
Then it all went wrong. A small and very vocal minority happened to enter the site at the same time as our life away from ThoughtCafe was changing. The free time that had once been spent creating harmony within the site was no longer available - and chaos soon followed - culminating in the eventual closing of “ThoughtCafe” in April 2004.
After a few years away, the internet has changed, people have changed, and the technology has changed. I also received an email - the first in years - from a member of the old website. “Just wanted to let you know that people still talk about ThoughtCafe in other writing sites - that we all miss it”.
I started thinking that maybe it was time to take another look - to give ThoughtCafe another chance. Of course, the original “.com” domain name has been bought by a cyber-squatter, who will not release it unless I pay exorbitant amounts of money. I did discover “www.thoughtcafe.net” was available though - and happened to have been looking at various content management systems recently.
The email from the stranger was all I needed. Over yesterday evening and this morning, the site has had new life breathed into it, and is now sat at www.thoughtcafe.net awaiting it’s first visitors.
If you are interested in writing - be that creative writing, poetry, or even journalism - why not head over to ThoughtCafe right now!