Slash for Not Yet Techies

Slash is the original program for installing, running and administering web logs, better known as blogs. In 1997 Rob Malda set up the first web log site, slashdot.org and began implementing a free for all real time communication systems that demonstrates the enormous of the Internet to both educate, entertain and change mere users and customers to active participants providing near-immediate feedback to web writers. Slash grew out of the programs he and others wrote to make this a reality.

Blogs are much like web discussion groups that have been common for some time, but even easier to use and potentially more anarchic and useful. Slash is not the only program you can use to implement a blog on your web site, but as the first to face and solve the technical problems and be adjusted based on high amounts of user feedback, it deserves first consideration.

Besides, it is free, determinedly open source. Many of the others are too, but they are all copycats.

But blogs are its main function.

It is set up to run on an Apache server, common on the Internet. It has a database administration layer and can perform powerful caching - new users will want to read old messages.

Say you as a registered user (there must be some control on access, because too many people on Internet abuse any and everything that lets itself be abused, from young kids just discovering profanity to adults promoting pyramid schemes) want to make some comment or post an article on a subject of the web site. That is your Slash Story.

A site's Author (who really is here functioning as an editor, so I disagree with this terminology, but I didn't invent the program, so what do I know?) reviews the Story for interest and appropriateness and posts it or not. Slash has administrative tools for this.

Site visitors can read the Story online and use Slash's other tools to make their own comments. So it can be like reading a newspaper story where previous readers have already posted criticisms of the reporter's style, corrected errors and made arguments about the reporter's politics -- and maybe other comments by participants in the story's events. ("I didn't do it!")

Slash is one program that is helping to revolutionize how we get information, use and interact with it -- and with other people around the world.

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