
WordPress was b2/cafelog (2004) - ziodave
http://cafelog.com/
======
luso_brazilian

        What is b2 ? 
        A classy news/weblog tool (aka log ware).
    

Two remarkable things in this statement

1\. It's been a long time since people called this "weblogging", so long that
most people don't even remember that's where "blog" and "blogging" came from.

2\. Trends are really fickle, what is classy one year looks very dated the
next, and in a decade or two comes back as retro cool.

~~~
DiabloD3
3\. Fonts used to be unreadably small because we all had 640x480 or 800x600
17-21" monitors at the time, and it wasn't small on those.

~~~
hapless
640x480 @ 14" is 57 dpi, but Windows, back then, was commonly configured for
96 dpi.

Making fonts tiny was the only way for them not to render _huge_ on the
typical end-user device.

~~~
frik
1280x1024 on a 17"/19" TFT screen was common in 2004. Your numbers are from a
decade before that. Websites were often optimised for minimum width of 800px
to cater also old 800x600 CRT screens from last century.

~~~
DiabloD3
I didn't get an LCD until like 2008 or 2009.

But yeah, I was doing 1280x960 on a 17".

~~~
frik
CRTs are bad for your eyes. I replaced all CRTs in my life with LCD in 2001.
They got very inexpensive in 2002.

CRTs were very flexible when choosing a screen resolution- 32x200, 800x600, or
even 1600x1200 on a 17" \- no problem. Today many cheap LCDs look only fine in
their native resolution.

I wish we one could still buy 16:10 or even 4:3 LCD monitors nowadays. A ~4K
monitor in 4:3 would be awesome.

~~~
DiabloD3
LCDs had really bad contrast, and IPS wasn't really a thing yet. I just was
horribly unimpressed with how bad LCDs looked for the longest time.

Now I'm pining for an impulse driven OLED. True blacks combined with the pixel
grid an LCD has, with no persistence of vision issues.

------
jakobloekke
"Pages are generated dynamically from the MySQL database, so no clumsy
'rebuilding' is involved". Funny! Today, static site generators market
themselves on the exact opposite pain/benefit perspective.

~~~
ohashi
We used to use terminals into powerful machines, then the personal computer
revolution came along, and now everything is back on machines that aren't in
your house and we call it the cloud.

~~~
zappo2938
Didn't Microsoft fight hard against this trend?

~~~
frik
Nowadays, they are all in with their bet on Azure, Windows10-as-service,
Office365.

------
psychonaut420
They also used to spam google to pay their costs in the early days

[http://waxy.org/2005/03/wordpress_websi/](http://waxy.org/2005/03/wordpress_websi/)

~~~
timrpeterson
Now this needs to get more coverage.

~~~
freshyill
Yeah, this unfortunate yet incredibly common abuse pattern from 10 years ago
needs more coverage!

------
keithpeter
I remember trying b2 out early in the development and finding the installation
on hosted server space a bit complicated. I had a few gremlins as well about
the navigation from article/archive/index pages.

Tried later when it was wordpress and used wp to publish the vanity page from
October 2004 to February 2010 my backups tell me. I used MoveableType and
Greymatter[2] as well - anyone remember those?

Went back to old school static web pages about 4 or 5 years ago, mainly
because I wasn't writing much and keeping the scripts up to date was getting
to be a drag...

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greymatter_%28software%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greymatter_%28software%29)

~~~
bshimmin
I certainly remember Movable Type, and I think a few well-known blogs are
still powered by it: two that spring to mind are Daring Fireball and
kottke.org. (Probably a case of "if it works, why change it?".)

~~~
flardinois
We used it at ReadWriteWeb back in the day, too. Can't say it was especially
user friendly, but it got the job done.

------
mohsinr
>> "If you like b2, please rate it at HotScripts.com"

Wow those were the days when I used to browse for php scripts in that site,
before sourceforge or github became the hub for open source.

------
agumonkey
forked by Mullenweg to become WP, more here [http://winningwp.com/a-brief-
history-of-wordpress/](http://winningwp.com/a-brief-history-of-wordpress/)

best part [http://winningwp.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/05/W-WordPress-...](http://winningwp.com/wp-
content/uploads/2013/05/W-WordPress-Matt-Quote.jpg)

(for the horror fans)

~~~
keithpeter
Quote from the history article linked above

 _" The following month, a principal competitor of WordPress, named Movable
Type, announced a radical change to their pricing structure, thereby adding
significant fuel to the WordPress fire by driving thousands of Moveable Type
customers their way."_

Yup: I had to move several project sites I was running for my then employer as
we had no actual budget (it was a college) and I worked out it would cost
several hundreds of pounds a year under the original commercial license. I
recollect that six apart later modified their cost structure, but too late we
were off.

------
wluu
I used to have a b2 based blog a long time ago.

I remember that there were no updates for a time, and then there was an
announcement about there being two forks, WordPress and b2evolution (I think
that was the name?).

It's hard to believe it's been so long since then, and WordPress has come a
long way since then! Never really kept track of the other fork.

------
deadalus
[http://web.archive.org/web/20011116202210/http://cafelog.com...](http://web.archive.org/web/20011116202210/http://cafelog.com/)

What is b2 ?

>>A news/blog tool.

How does it work ?

>>You log in, you type something and hit "blog this" and in the next second
it's on your page(s). Pages are generated dynamically from the MySQL database.

Requirements ?

>>A server that can run PHP4, and a MySQL database.

