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Wednesday, January 18, 2023

Uncovering lost wiki treasures, Pt 7 - This blog's history

The main blog for Dozerfleet has had several incarnations. It began in February of 2011, on the 11th of that year. It was taken down October 1st of 2011, then given new life on September 8th of 2012 on Tumblr. When Tumblr was abandoned in 2016, this blog returned to Blogger in October of 2020. Its spin-off Labs blog existed fora time before that, beginning in April of 2020.

Before the Labs blog was set up, and DzMD had a proper home, DzMD was known as "Utterly Sims," and existed on Tumblr as well. All of this was an effort to create a sleek, modern interface for sharing Dozerfleet news, and providing download pages for free content for fans. Previously, in the late 2000s, most such things operated out of The Dozerfleet Forum on Proboards. However, the Proboards interface was decidedly in need of a drastic overhaul. The lack of forum members enlisting further ensured that a blog made more sense than a forum.

Other predecessors

In the days before social networking, newsletters were typed up in Microsoft Publisher and physically mailed to someone's home address. During the Cormorant era, this was the only way for the Dozerfleet founder to do such things shy of posting comments to someone else's online forum. Two noteworthy predecessors to the Blog and Forum both would be Yo-Splaz! Newsletter and Dolphinformia, both presses of which were designed specifically with two of the Dozerfleet founder's past love interests in mind.

Carly was the recipient of Yo-Splaz! and Emily of Dolphinformia, though neither one routinely wrote back concerning either publication. Concerning Wilgrace, Facebook contact replaced the traditional system. Political topics were addressed in detail on the Blog, and in short on Facebook and Twitter. As of the 2012 reboot, the blog fell back on dealing with political topics. However, topics were split between ones that the main blog was designed for, and others that were handled by the Dozerfleet founder's personal blog. Following the 2012 elections, the Dozerfleet Database's mention of the Dozerfleet founder's political handlings was designated to be history and archival only.

Wilinski Forest

On Friday, October 26th of 2012, the Dozerfleet founder's personal blog was re-branded as "Wilinski Forest," the place "from which Ivan observes a world in turmoil." These references to names and places and events in ''[[Ride of the Three Bulldozers]]'' allowed for the personal blog to receive a radical facelift. This was done in preparation of Tuesday, November 6th of 2012, at which point Wilinski Forest's content and that of The Dozerfleet Blog would cease their redundancy agreement.

Wilinski Forest, an offshoot project of The Dozerfleet blog and wiki, got to be the location from which the Dozerfleet founder could discuss contents that did not pertain to Dozerfleet operations per se, such as the Stop the Crooked Rainbow Campaign. This new agreement freed up the Dozerfleet Blog to be more clearly and explicitly about project developments.

The benefit of having one blog dedicated to political/social/life commentary and another to project development was not only that it expanded the overall Dozerfleet Web Network significantly; but also that it reduced a lot of burdens on the wiki in terms of trying to remain current. It also created a place for breaking news that eliminated the need for the wiki to have a front page Twitter feed. It was later decommissioned. Partially due to low viewing, and partially due to the logistics of Tumblr.

At present, most content of the sort that would have appeared on Wilinski Forest is now shared on Facebook and / or MeWe, usually in debate groups.

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