The day I mentioned in my “requiem” has finally come: any visitor to ficlets.com will be redirected to the blog announcement of its closure. However, all is not lost.
Kevin Lawver, the original creator of Ficlets, has gotten his “ficlets memorial” up and running—all stories and comments from the ficlets.com site are preserved there in their original format. Those who were unable to back their own ficlets up can rest assured they were still preserved.
But that’s not all. Lawver is in the process of creating a new site, called ficly.com, that will serve as a “Ficlets 2.0” after it has been completed. While not everybody likes the name, it should at least allow the ficlets community to continue from where it left off (literally, in some cases) once it is up and running.
Ficly is expected to be ready in perhaps a couple of months. In the meanwhile, there is a form on the site to leave email addresses for notification of when it is ready to launch. More details can be found on Kevin Lawver’s blog.
Jason Garber deserves a lot of the credit for pushing us to do ficly. He’s driving the project at the moment while I’m busy with work commitments. He got the folks at Viget Labs to donate their time and talents to the design, and he’s also recruited his own CTO to help with coding! He was ficlets’ original front-end developer, and I’m thrilled to be able to work with him again.
Well, great! Hopefully that means Ficly will be like Ficlets was but even better, since he’ll have seen how the original worked out in actual use and can improve upon it.
I don’t know if you can fully appreciate how cool this is for the authors like myself who loved ficlets.
Is there any chance the current shut-down blog could advertise the new site? Or is AOL being total d***s about this?
John: I think it’s safe to say the latter probably applies. All we can really do is try to make sure that “Ficly” appears in conjunction with “Ficlets” as much as possible so the search engines link ’em.