Dylan Greene dot com

DABU, the free blogging service I created, got a bit of blogging buzz this weekend when one of the most read bloggers in the world, Robert Scoble, launched a "developer's challenge" - with a unique prize: He would switch blogging services to whichever service could answer the challenge first.

The challenge was to have full OPML support.

Well, silly me, even though I knew what OPML was, and was a beta tester for Dave Winer's OPML Editor, and was at Gnomedex when Dave said OPML was the next big thing, but I still didn't have OPML support in DABU. So like any self-respecting geek, I stayed up late and added it.

It took just a couple hours - the hard part was finding a standard to follow, Dave's site wouldn't loading (it does now), and OPML.org (also run by Dave) didn't answer the questions I had. No sweat, I found Dave's OPML implementation, and used as my spec. I got it working, and even tested it in Dave's OPML Editor and it worked on the first try.

So I posted on Scoble's comments "DABU supports OPML" with a few links so people could test it.

Unfortunately I wasn't the first to post a response.

The next morning Tim Macrina, who graciously hosts DABU and my other projects, messaged me excited but slightly worried: "What if Scoble switches to DABU - how much bandwidth would that be?" I told him not to worry: "What are the chances that Scoble would actually leave his current URL?"

Then I started getting a bunch of congratulatory emails. Scoble announced on his site that he's going to use DABU.

Whoa!

I gave Scoble a call to talk about the bandwidth potential. It didn't seem as bad as Tim and I expected. Tim was ready to order another T1 if it came down to it.

However, the story doesn't end there. People started getting angry. Specifically, Linux, WordPress, and Apache fans. The terms of the challenge were that he was going to switch to the first service to support OPML. The big question was: I Scoble choosing DABU over WordPress because DABU is hosted on a Windows machine whereas WordPress is on a Linux box, even though WordPress was first?

Scoble is a man of his word, and a huge supporter of the community, and said he'd use WordPress as promissed. Does that put DABU out of the picture? Hardly. He's going to use DABU too, but he hasn't said what for yet.

Scoble story links:

Sept 29: Developer challenge: I'll switch blogs to the first blogging service that supports OPML
Sept 30: New URL appears on DABU, WordPress still in the hunt too
Oct 1: OK, OK, I am gonna use WordPress, but I'm going to use DABU too

The number of DABU sites has doubled this weekend - so thanks for all the press Scoble!