Nostalgia: Decommissioning labs.episerver.com
Labs (feels almost like an old friend, hence the loving nickname) like me, Joined Episerver (Or rather ElektroPost AB as it was then known) in the second half of 2007 and in my eyes it was the original birthplace of the amazing blogging community that thrives more than ever today on Episerver World (and all over the internet). Since 2012, more and more blogs were moved or syndicated to Episerver World - and since that time it's only been made available for legacy and historical purposes.
But now the time had come to shut it down. The site and the server it was running on hadn't been updated in a long time - and it would have been a big effort to update it and fix potential security issues that might have aggregated over time.
Before it drifts into a history that can only be reached through the web.archive.org (http://web.archive.org/web/20070101000000*/labs.episerver.com specifically) let me share a few nostalgic screenshots from our common history:
Over the years it served more than 600.000 sessions with with thousands of blog posts and downloads. Fun fact, the most viewed blog posts over the years was a post from Per Bjürström about WebResource.axd from 2008 followed by a post by Steve Celius about speeding up Visual Studio. Sadly, I have to look all the way to 6th place for my own most popular blog post around Category Dropdowns for custom properties.
Before authorizing the decommissioning I made a final visit to the back end.
Labs was still running strong on CMS 5 🙂
And I found my first blog post (on Labs - I was blogging from way back - and now I feel old):
In Admin mode you can also see how Labs was a bit of a testing ground for the old Research Team - testing sites with big (for that time) amounts of content:
Finally, it's also worth remembering how Labs was the original birthplace of the EMVP program that is still today thriving - and larger than ever.
So, with these nostalgic screenshots, I say farewell to my old friend Labs...
P.S. Naturally, I took a final .episerverdata export of the site, so if some of the original content producers want a copy of their old content they are welcome to contact me and we can see if we can extract it.
Apr 16, 2018
This is before my time, but I can still recognize the style which was more or less the same in CMS 6 R2 (when I started at Episerver)
When it's sad to say goodbye to an old friend, let's remember how far we have gone from those days :)
Bye bye labs. So does this also mean the Episerver CMS 5 header image banner will get removed from the Default theme? ;-)