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First post ever on DW
Ever wondered what the first post ever on Dreamwidth was?
Well, this is it. The date might surprise you, though: April 5th, 2008 - long before dreamwidth.org actually appeared on the Web in closed beta form on February 14th, 2009.
Before DW went into closed beta, the servers that were being used for what would eventually become dreamwidth.org were known as "staging servers", and only Mark and Denise had access to them. The code itself, though, was already available to be installed and volunteer development had been progressing for some time, so even though the site itself wasn't open, devs knew more-or-less how it'd look.
Bonus info: Although you may not be aware of it, at first, LiveJournal - which DW is based on - didn't have clusters, and each post was referenced by an arcane URL looking like http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?itemid=1 (which points to the first post made on LJ). For posts that were made before clusters existed, they still kept the itemids associated with them, so these URLs still work on LJ.
But DW built on ten years' worth of LJ code and DW already had clusters when it started, so the URLs didn't work. For a while, though, you could still get to the first post in that manner because Mark deliberately twiddled with the DB so that the equivalent URL would work on Dreamwidth too.
It no longer works now, because we've removed support for these old sort of IDs, since we don't have them and never will, and neither will any sites using our code. (We're cleaning up a lot of old and crufty code that never gets used.) So in lieu of that, I thought I'd post about it here, instead. :)
Hope you enjoyed this trip through history!
(Oh, and the first post from closed beta is fun, too.)
Well, this is it. The date might surprise you, though: April 5th, 2008 - long before dreamwidth.org actually appeared on the Web in closed beta form on February 14th, 2009.
Before DW went into closed beta, the servers that were being used for what would eventually become dreamwidth.org were known as "staging servers", and only Mark and Denise had access to them. The code itself, though, was already available to be installed and volunteer development had been progressing for some time, so even though the site itself wasn't open, devs knew more-or-less how it'd look.
Bonus info: Although you may not be aware of it, at first, LiveJournal - which DW is based on - didn't have clusters, and each post was referenced by an arcane URL looking like http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?itemid=1 (which points to the first post made on LJ). For posts that were made before clusters existed, they still kept the itemids associated with them, so these URLs still work on LJ.
But DW built on ten years' worth of LJ code and DW already had clusters when it started, so the URLs didn't work. For a while, though, you could still get to the first post in that manner because Mark deliberately twiddled with the DB so that the equivalent URL would work on Dreamwidth too.
It no longer works now, because we've removed support for these old sort of IDs, since we don't have them and never will, and neither will any sites using our code. (We're cleaning up a lot of old and crufty code that never gets used.) So in lieu of that, I thought I'd post about it here, instead. :)
Hope you enjoyed this trip through history!
(Oh, and the first post from closed beta is fun, too.)
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