The Only Blogger in Corsica
It was late 2000, and Michel Valdrighi (michelv) was writing a blog post in his small apartment above a bar in Corsica. The “only blogger in Corsica” used a creaking dial-up AOL connection that disconnected every thirty minutes. He shared his apartment with two cats, No Name and Gribouille, who perched on a windowsill overlooking a high drop.
Like many bloggers, Michel experimented with different web publishing platforms, and started out with HTML before moving to Blogger. But he discovered that Blogger wasn’t as fully-featured as he’d wanted. For example, it didn’t have a built-in comment system. This was at a time when bloggers could sign up for external commenting services that were often unreliable and unstable. Michel signed up for two different commenting services — both of which disappeared, along with all of the comments and discussions. Blogger was also plagued by stability issues, and users sometimes joked that the platform was “sometimes up.”
Michel was learning the server-side scripting language PHP. Unlike a language like Perl, PHP is relatively easy to learn, making it a useful tool for people who want to start hacking on software. One of Michel’s first PHP projects was a Corsican-language dictionary: this experience taught him that he could use PHP to manipulate data, inspiring him to create his own blogging script. In June 2001, Michel started developing b2, [footnote]The name b2 is a combination of the word “blog” and “Song 2” by the British band Blur, which Michel had been listening to regularly at that time. He combined them to make “blog2,” then “blogger2,” until he arrived at b2. b2 was also known as Cafelog, which was the name Michel had planned to give to the 1.0 series as no b2 domains were available, and the name was too short for a project on SourceForge.[/footnote] a “PHP+MySQL alternative to Blogger and Greymatter.” He wrote:
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