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   Calepin Redux: Minimalist Blogging Platform Goes Open Source

   Marshall Clow

   Back in January, I wrote about the Dropbox-based blogging service
   [1]Calepin (see '[2]Calepin: Simple, Minimalist Blogging with a Twist,'
   5 January 2012). Since then, I have used the Calepin platform to
   publish various short essays and to [3]share fragments of family trees
   with members of my extended family.

   However, Jökull Sólberg Auðunsson, the man behind Calepin, has been
   unable to keep up with the demands of running the service. In a recent
   letter to subscribers, he wrote: 'I work full time as an interactive
   director at an advertising agency, so it is hard for me to develop
   Calepin into a business.'

   In response to his lack of time, Jökull has decided to [4]release
   Calepin as open source, hosted on github. This means that anyone who
   wishes can run a Calepin server, assuming sufficient technical skills
   and an available server.

   Jökull will continue to support those people who wish to run their own
   servers, but the future of the original Calepin server is unclear. 60
   days ago, he tweeted that the service would be shutting down in 90
   days.

   While I am saddened to see the Calepin service go away, its forthcoming
   demise drives home one of the points I made in my original article: If
   the service disappears, for whatever reason, I will have lost only the
   public face of my blog, not the actual data that I posted there. All of
   my articles live on my laptop, in my Dropbox folder. I don't have to
   worry about 'getting my data out' of Calepin, because Calepin was
   hosting only a copy of my original data. Compare that, if you will, to
   people who are scrambling to get their data off of MobileMe before this
   weekend.

   For those who are looking for a Calepin replacement, check out
   [5]Scriptogr.am, which looks and works much like Calepin and which can
   probably take over for Calepin in a matter of minutes. For those who
   want to host their own Dropbox-driven blogging service but can't figure
   out how install Calepin, there's also Ian Landsman's [6]Kudos, which
   may be easier to install and maintain.

   [7][tn_Scriptogram.jpg]

References

   1. http://calepin.co/
   2. http://tidbits.com/article/12701
   3. http://marshall.calepin.co/
   4. https://github.com/jokull/calepin
   5. http://scriptogr.am/
   6. https://github.com/ianlandsman/Kudos
   7. http://tidbits.com/resources/2012-06/Scriptogram.png