What Happened to OSWD.org?

Posted on Nov 10, 2005

OSWD (open-source web design) has been a favorite resource of mine for years now but appears to be gone (and maybe for good). In case you never heard of it, it offered free, downloadable open-source designs submitted by the community (this site uses a modified OSWD design). Now, back when I first found the site, the quality of the designs was often not so great, but over time this improved substantially (especially when they started having design contests) and it became a first stop for me (especially as I am not a designer) when I needed to create CSS-based, XHTML-compliant designs.Recently I began planning a redesign of my site and decided to hop on over to OSWD only to find that it was down with a message saying they were having technical difficulties and would be back up shortly. A couple days later it appeared with the following message:

A notice.

OSWD is currently down. Over the past three weeks, I have developed a new version of the site, complete with a redesign and new backend.

I was looking to relaunch tomorrow, however, upon inspection of the data on the old server, I believe Aaron "MonkeyMan" Nikula has deleted the contents of the database. After reading some of what Aaron has posted on the SitePoint Forums, I am under the impression he has made a copy of the database before deletion.

I hope to have the database recovered shortly and the site relaunched as soon as possible. I apologize to the faithful community OSWD has fostered over the past half decade.

Frank Skettino Founder, OSWD

Well, in examining the link to SitePoint forums, it seems this story is more complicated and boils down to a dispute between the people who ran the site. Thsi post by Aaron Nikula seems to dispute the assetions made on the OSWD site:

Hello everyone, I'm Aaron "MonkeyMan" Nikula, I've been running OSWD for the past 3 years, so here's your authoritative explanation.

On Oct 13th our site was displaying a "Forbidden" error. We tried to contact our host (phpwebhosting.com), but despite our "emergency" support ticket it took them a week to reply to it and they do not have a phone support number. Turns out they had attempted to contact us through an email address that Frank used to create an account years ago. After all that was sorted out it turns out they disabled our account because the website was crashing their server. They have 196 users on that machine, 92 mysqld threads, and 33 apache threads, so I think we just used up too many resources for a shared (and cheap) host.

Regardless, none of that has anything to do with the problems we're having now. A little bit of OSWD history first. OSWD was started by Frank Skettino about 4 years ago. I joined 1 month after the project was created (before we even had the OSWD.org domain) and that's when I started writing PHP code for the project. After a while (months) Frank started doing less and less and I started picking up slack. I think I've written 95% of the code that was running the website. I also maintained the website. About 50% of the designs were approved by me, 45% by various volunteers (Josh, Josh, Locke, and Skatters to name a few), and 5% were done by Frank in the early days. In fact, when I had to take a trip and was away from the internet for about 4 months, nobody maintained the site. There were hundreds of designs in the queue and nobody approved them until I got back. I also started the OSWD design contests, in fact (as Josh mentioned) we were in the middle of one when the site went down.

After OSWD started to gain some steam Frank decided to add our first commercial venture. He added the template monster affiliate program to the website. It has been criticized in the past by our members because it's not open source and people confused them with our free designs. I think it's worth noting that he never told anyone how much money he made and he didn't share the money. He was paying for the hosting, so I was fine with that (although our hosting cost was $10/month, I can assure you he was making more than that).

So, back to the present: all these things were making me upset. When the site went down I thought it would be a nice time to ask Frank to pass the website to me for the benefit of the project. He hasn't talked to me since. Also, I don't have access to OSWD or access to my email account. OSWD DOES have new hosting, the transfer was done 2 weeks ago. The problem is that Frank won't do the work to bring it back up. There are no technical problems anymore, he's just sitting on it. Also, he won't give the project to anyone else to do it for him, I think because he wants to keep as much control on the website as possible.

So that's what's happening guys. I really appreciate all the offers of hosting, but that's not the issue here. And really, unless Frank gives up the website, there's not a whole lot I can do help. Hope that clears things up!

It would certainly be a shame to lose a great resource over petty infighting, but that appears to be what has happened. Here's hoping that they can resolve their differences for the benefit of the community.

Comments

Michael Dawson According to www.oswd.org, it appears that OSWD is planned to make a triumphant return as soon as some files are restored.

Posted By Michael Dawson / Posted on 11/10/2005 at 8:31 AM

Jeff Fall That really sucks... I was just thinking today about using them for a side project and was going to check their site out right after I read your blog. DOH! Hopefully they can grow up and get their infighting out of the way and get on with the site.

Posted By Jeff Fall / Posted on 11/10/2005 at 7:28 PM

Brian Rinaldi Well, the site appears to be back now, with a new design. My first impressions are that (while the old site wasn't the most usable of sites I knew) this one is far worse. In fact, if the more recent designs (which were generally a major improvement) are there, I cannot find them (however it seems that they are gone). At this point, I am thoroughly underwhelmed and disappointed by the new site.

Posted By Brian Rinaldi / Posted on 11/12/2005 at 4:24 PM

Tom Aaron "MonkeyMan" Nikula has spin the site off to http://openwebdesign.org/ Go check it out. I think it's better than Frank's.

Posted By Tom / Posted on 11/13/2005 at 9:01 AM

Brian Rinaldi It does look a lot better, if in part because it looks alot like the old OSWD. The designs that are there appear much nicer. Interestingly, some of the links (like in the contest winners) still had OSWD's domain in the link. Glad to see that the concept lives on, I only wish they had been able to work out there differences.

Posted By Brian Rinaldi / Posted on 11/13/2005 at 4:38 PM

Anshu Prakash Pathak Guys, Grow Up, stop this infighting...and let this whole open source design thing go on...

Posted By Anshu Prakash Pathak / Posted on 11/29/2005 at 10:37 AM

Silver Years later oswd.org never recovered!

Posted By Silver / Posted on 09/25/2009 at 9:29 AM

InletDude Well is it the 9/11 anniversary and thought to visit site that had not been working for years. It still doesn't. What a shame.

So, forget about Frank (Frankly it would appear, doesn't give a da**) and go to: http://openwebdesign.org/

Posted By InletDude / Posted on 09/11/2011 at 8:34 AM

Anshu Prakash Pathak That infighting never stopped....but Aaron still have managed to maintain a good website...Frank is frankly no more...

Posted By Anshu Prakash Pathak / Posted on 09/11/2011 at 10:22 AM

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My name is Brian Rinaldi and I am the Web Community Manager for Flash Platform at Adobe. I am a regular blogger, speaker and author. I also founded RIA Unleashed conference in Boston. The views expressed on this site are my own & not those of my employer.