(This article was originally posted at highfiber.org, 17 April 2007.)
The first edition of highfiber went online in november of 2001. At the time, it took me two weeks to design and build the whole thing end-to-end. we debuted with 10 articles and a pool of 5 writers. by the sixth edition (which we released in 2005), my development timelines had begun to exceed 90 days, and the amount of time i had to devote to managing the website itself was very close to that of a part-time job. Last year, i took a step back from actively managing highfiber, to see how long it would survive without my direct involvement. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that, day after day, fresh content was being properly published to the frontpage by our patented pat/poke system (a precursor of Kevin Rose’s Digg.com; I’m still waiting for my check) and week after week the community would continue to grow in size. At last count, there are about 39,593 accounts in our users database (about 75% of which are undoubtedly smurfs, but I guess that’s beside the point).
i’ve been thinking very seriously about shutting highfiber down for months now, because of the fact that i think it has reached the upper limits of what it originally set out to achieve. this was due both to my (relatively modest) level of technical experience at the time, and the rules system we put together that gave the site so much of its attitude. However, i found that the more i thought about it, the more it became obvious that just closing our doors completely was the wrong way to go. The community was still there, they just wanted something new to do.
i’ve learned a lot since 2001, and in many ways, the months after i left highfiber have easily been the most educational period of my life. version one took me two weeks to build, version six took 12, and our all-new edition took about 35 total working hours. as you can probably imagine, it’s a small project, but it has a lot of room to grow. that’s actually the reason why i decided to call it “version zero” instead of simply following the current numbering. we’re retaining nothing from the old site and are forging a completely new path together, armed with some spiffy new gear.
welcome back, everyone. it’s been a long time.