Is sascommunity.org gone?

[Quentin]

Hi,

I know that a year (or two?) ago it was decided to freeze sascommunity.org, I think with the plan to migrate key content here, and eventually I assume sascommunity.org would go offline.  Has that day come?

I've been using http://www.sascommunity.org/planet/ as a casual browser for recent blog posts.  Today I'm getting DNS errors when I go to www.sascommunity.org.

Thanks,

-Q.

[novinosrin]

Really? That's sad 😞

RIP sascommunity.org 

RIP  sascommunity.org    rose again as all that content has been reincanrated i.e transported here?

Thank you for letting us know. 

[ChrisHemedinger · Accepted solution]

@Quentin - it's not gone.  I can still reach it.  However, the IP address will have changed.

Because of the reduced traffic to the site, we were able to reduce the style of hosting that the site uses -- and that changed the IP.  But I can reach it from here and I've tested with some external tools -- still accessible.

But if others are having trouble reaching it, I'd like to know.

[Quentin]

Thanks @ChrisHemedinger .

Hmm, this morning it wouldn't work from my PC (corporate network) or my personal cell phone.  Right now I still can't access from the corporate PC, but my cell phone is accessing it fine.  

From the PC, I get : "DNS error (the host name of the page you are looking for does not exist)".

But if it's a recent change, looks like it might take a day or so for DNS changes to propagate around the globe... Will try again tomorrow. 

[ChrisHemedinger]

The change happened on Monday.  

We are looking toward the future though, when the site won't be around.  We've migrated most of the popular articles to communities.sas.com, and legacy proceedings are now hosted by SAS.  I can appreciate that people still use the /planet feed.  Of the blogs that you see there, can you point out the ones that you find useful that aren't hosted at blogs.sas.com?  I can think of a few, but I'm curious what others are looking for so we can plan for an alternative channel.

[Quentin]

Certainly understand the need to complete the shutdown.  And appreciate the effort to transfer key content.

There are a small handful of blogs that pop up in the /planet feed that aren't hosted at SAS (KanSAS code, maybe note colon, sorry, I still can't see it from work so can't check).  To be honest, the main reason I like /planet is that it's a simple chronological feed, simple UI (text list showing titles and first few lines of the post), and it's almost all programming stuff.  So it was an easy thing to check a few times a week, and scroll through whatever is new.  Clearly, /planet was built by a programmer.  Blogs.sas.com is much more visually engaging etc, which is what you want for marketing purposes, but it's less useful as just a feed.

That said, I suppose the real solution is for me to take another shot at using an RSS reader or some other aggregator, so that I can curate my own feed.  

That (more) said, If you are thinking of making a replacement for the /planet feed, it was nice that any blog writer could submit their blog to /planet.  More than once when I stumbled across a useful blog, I suggested that they submit to /planet to get more eyes.  And I was always happy when a new user blog popped up in the /planet feed.

[ChrisHemedinger]

Just an update - I am hearing from others that they can't reach the site.  I can still reach it from SAS.  Checking on this -- there might be a DNS record that we need to update here, as we maintain the domain.

[Quentin]

Hi @ChrisHemedinger .  I know it's bad form to re-open an old question, but... 

Today when I go to www.sascommunity.org/planet/ it redirects to https://communities.sas.com/.  

Was there a recent change to planet? After all these years, /planet is still my favorite way to browse recent blog posts from SAS and the SAS community.

Thx,

-Q.

[ChrisHemedinger]

Yes @Quentin -- sasCommunity.org has been decommissioned.  We began the process in 2017 by putting it into read-only mode, and for the past several months we've had a banner on the site announcing it would be taken offline Oct 30, 2020.  We moved the most popular content (articles) to communities.sas.com.  As a result, site traffic on sasCommunity.org was just a trickle of visits.

I'm sorry I don't have a good public replacement of curated SAS blogs. Personally I've used feedly.com as a way to aggregate blogs that I'm interested -- you build up your lists of interests on your own, so these aren't curated for you.