Blogbabel all’asta su Ebay

Non sappiamo dire se la notizia è bella o brutta. Certamente si tratta di una notizia.

Blogbabel il più utile, ma anche il più discusso strumento per “misurare e navigare” la blogosfera italiana è stato messo in vendita all’asta su Ebay. Prezzo base 4.999 Euro Chiusura dell’asta il 9 settembre 2009 alle 13:45:16 CEST.

Ora siamo tutti curiosi di capire la valutazione finale di Blogbabel e il suo destino successivo che speriamo glorioso

Ecco la storica asta:

Blogbabel, a blog indexing/aggregator service.  More than 350.000 pageviews a month, live since 2006 Blogbabel is a blog indexing/aggregation service which was launched in the summer of 2006. It’s currently indexing almost 15.000 Italian blogs, has more than 220.000 visits and 350.000 pageviews a month (Google Analytics). I am selling it to concentrate on other projects, in the hope that the buyers will have the resources and enthusiasm to make it grow further.
BlogBabel is currently indexing Italian blogs and has an Italian interface, but the software can be easily translated into different languages as we did with the Spanish version we had in 2006-2007, and later abandoned for the difficulties in managing a foreign service from here.

I can also assist you in localizing the service to a specific language or implementing additional features if you win the auction, with a separate agreement based on standard consulting fees.
What you get
Few bits I got from or used in my other projects (the feed parser, the blog app, and a few small libraries I wrote and use in most of my Django work) which you will get without an exclusive license, and can be easily swapped out for other parts with little work; the database with more than 3 years of indexed posts (>30Gb); instructions on how to set up the service, 4 hours of help for setting it up.
What you don’t get
Everything else: I will not give you support or fix bugs (not that there are any critical ones after more than 3 years), you don’t get any claims on the hardware or line powering the site now, and no guarantee whatsoever from me. I repeat, the site has been up for 3 years and it has served millions of people during this time, so any problems you have will be most likely introduced by you and are your responsibility. You also don’t get any documentation, but the code architecture is really simple and mostly adheres to Python’s and Django’s standard practices, so any half-decent Python programmer will be able to find his way around after a few hours.
What you could get
After you have won the auction, you can ask for a separate agreement on: the server(s) running BlogBabel, ready to be moved to your datacenter or be kept in place if you make your own deal with my provider. Consulting time from me to help on new features.
Some specs
Just to give you an idea of the size of Blogbabel’s codebase, sloccount counts 27,359 physical lines of code for an estimated development effort of 6.46 person-years (1 year for 6 developers). The software has been written by me in Python using the Django framework, and runs on Linux using MySQL, Sphinx Search, and lighttpd. It’s currently running on a quad-core 2.4Ghz Opteron machine with 2xSATA drives in RAID1 and 8Gb of RAM acting as a backend, plus a second dual-core 3.0Ghz Pentium machine with 2xSATA drives in RAID1 and 4Gb of RAM acting as a frontend. You could reasonably use a single quad-core machine for the whole service, as loads are mostly below 1.0 on both machines.