Hot off the virtual press, the RISC OS community now has another source of news and opinion in the form of The RISC OS Blog. The emphasis, states the blogger, will be on “modern RISC OS”. He (or she) intends to write “the occasional snippets of news regarding the RISC OS operating system and all that surrounds it, and just generally [write] about the platform as a whole.”
In the first post, welcoming readers, the blogger explains why he is doing this, and goes on to provide a little background into his RISC OS history – a history which apparently includes a wide range of RISC OS machines, although he has now parted with them following a house move, and is currently using VirtualRPC-SA, with plans to return to using native hardware in the form of an ARMini. Two further articles, posted today, discuss the RiscTV digital upgrade and Iconizer II from MathMagical Software.
The RISC OS Blog is a welcome addition to the handful of sites trying to keep on top of news in the RISC OS community. Almost everybody who is actively contributing to RISC OS in some way or other is doing so in their spare time, fitting their RISC OS efforts around their normal lives – and that means when it comes to news, although the community is a small one, it’s still all to easy to overlook things, so the more people there are trying to keep their eye on things and shouting about it to the world, the better.
In addition to that, each new website that pops up dealing with RISC OS in some way is raising the operating system’s profile, not just within our little community, but out there in the wider world of the web. Only in a small way, granted – we can’t reasonably expect to get RISC OS back to the standing it enjoyed in its heyday, but we can shout loud enough that the rest of the world notices we’re still here, rather than remembers us as nothing more than a part of computing history that died with Acorn.
As an addendum, when I added The RISC OS Blog’s RSS feed to my reader, as well as the current crop of posts I saw several dated 12th February 2011 – which were, in fact, posts from Peter Naulls from some years ago. Investigating further, it appears riscos.blog.com was Peter’s blog until he moved things around – Blog.com at some point ‘expired’ the subdomain, which was no longer in use, and once again made it available for someone else to register – as can be seen by looking at the last entry on The Wayback Machine, from 21st March, 2009, which shows that the subdomain no longer existed, and (after a number of redirects) offers the visitor the chance to register a new blog.