What is Skribe?

What is Skribe? you may be asking (or maybe not.. anyway)

Its hard to know where to start when describing what Skribe is and where it came from; over the years – here is what I can remember …

I joined the project in the summer of 2001, as a PHP Developer / Web Designer looking to re-vamp the what was effectively, an open source project projects website. The result was the Skribe Developers Extranet, kindly hosted freely by dune.net. Development on Skribe began, it was (and still is) a web application that offers users a blogging service with social networking built-in. In summary it is aimed at casual users and professional writers alike, as a publishing platform for all types of content on the web.

It moved from open source to closed source, many (many) developers came and went – and measurable output amounted to almost nothing. We spent a great deal of time re-inventing the wheel; building our own tools and processes that would eventually help us create Skribe. A lot discussion was generated, new ideas documented – and as the years went by, we saw many other companies have success in the same marketplace we were aiming for. In the summer of 2003, me and 3 others tried to push what we had out the door and into the trash – to start afresh. The result was a very simple J2EE (Struts powered) blogging application, built in xHTML with some Flash elements. It worked (for the most part) but was never publically released.

I have recently posted about my frustrations with this project . My plan is to introduce Ruby on Rails and agile software development to the project.

There is a core team of 3 people (including myself), that still hold to the hope that we can do something with Skribe. I believe we have enough ideas and the talent to make it work.

Stay tuned …