And we've crossed the line! Thank you, Danke schön.

On 18 June 2001 Antville saw the light of the day when Robert published the initial source code. Hannes mentioned it in his weblog for the first time.

Cordial congratulations to all of us!

Heute vor sechs Jahren, am 18. Juni 2001 hat Antville das Licht der Welt erblickt, als Robert den ursprünglichen Quellcode veröffenlichte. Hannes hat es in seinem Weblog damals zum ersten Mal erwähnt.

Ich gratuliere uns allen von Herzen!

This is so cool. After three weeks we just passed the next milestone of donations. That makes two months of writing fresh Antville code! Thanks to all you wonderful people.

For those who still wonder whether or why to spend some money I have compiled ten reasons to support Antville with your donation.

If we really should hit the magic 3.000€ this summer will be one of the hottest in recent years!

(English translation)

1. Webloggen wird zu einem noch angenehmeren Erlebnis.
2. Antville ist die Software, die einige der populärsten Weblog-Anbieter im Internetz antreibt.
3. Ihre Benutzerdaten werden nicht verkauft, Ihre Beiträge werden nicht verhökert.
4. Antville wird für die Community entwickelt, nicht damit es Yahoogle aufkauft.
5. Sie unterstützen freie, open-source Software. Nicht völlig kostenlos, aber immerhin tanzen Sie in Ihrem eigenen Club.
6. Nehmen Sie teil am Experiment, Software zusammen mit ihren Benutzern zu entwickeln.
7. Das "wir sind nicht böse"-Dogma ist wieder zu haben, schreiben wir's auf unsere Fahnen!
8. Antville.org rangiert heute noch unter den zehn besten Weblog-Anbietern.
9. Sie bloggen gern ohne Werbung und Kommerz.
10. Weil Sie Antville L.I.E.B.E.N.

Überzeugt? Hier geht's zu Ihrer Spende.

(Deutsche Fassung)

1. Antville will make your weblogging experience even more convenient.
2. It's the software that powers some of the most popular weblog services out in TEH internets.
3. Your user data won't be sold, your content won't be milked.
4. Antville is made for the community, not for being bought by Yahoogle.
5. It's free software and open source. Not exactly a free lunch but at least you're partying in your own club.
6. You'll participate in an experiment of user-driven software development.
7. The "we're not evil" dogma is available again, let's adopt it!
8. Antville.org is still in the top ten of the best blog providers.
9. You want to remain safe from advertising on Antville.org.
10. Because W.E.L.O.V.E. Antville.

Convinced? This way for donations.

Thanks a lot already, you wonderful and generous Antville people.

If we keep up with this pace we will make this Summer soooo happen!

Btw. I am off for a few days visiting the newly born twin nieces. (Yes, I am a twin uncle now!)

Thus, updates of the donation status will have to wait until the week-end. But I hope that won't stop anyone from being supportive.

In the meantime you can already take a peek at the preliminary roadmap (with an emphasis on the word preliminary) I am currently working on.

I also compiled a fresh list of Antville sites out there. It's quite impressive, I think – after all this time!

Update: There's now a roadmap draft online which will be turned into the final version, ASAP.

As a preliminary schedule for the coming months here's a first preview of the ASOC’07 roadmap:

I am planning three releases, each estimated with a 1000€ of donations and a month of my time.

Thus, depending on the total of donations, the Antville Summer Of Code 2007 will take between four weeks and three months (or even more, let's see).

The first ASOC’07 release, dubbed 1.2, which right now – according to the current state of donations – looks like a safe bet, will contain the most important and overdue bug fixes and hopefully, some of the most wanted new features.

As there are quite some preparations to do to make the actual work happen at all, this might look like a small step altogether, nevertheless it will lift our old Antville software over quite some heavy distance (which relates to two years in the temporal dimension).

If we cross the magic 2.000€ mark, we can expect release 1.3 to contain most of the requested new features. Of course, bugs introduced with 1.2 will have to be fixed in this release, too.

Release 1.3 and a total of donations of 3.000€ will bring you the round-up of the little bit more extravagant feature requests, and again fixes for the bugs we will find in the previous release.

I am currently working on a detailed list of features for every release and hopefully will be able publish it at the beginning of next week.