When it comes to have extreme feelings, Tabulas has to best exemplifies the chasm of emotions I have towards it. The feelings mix from despair ("Tabulas sucks, why bother?") to guilt ("I should really fix it up") to hope ("I can really sense it's on the cusp of being a great site!").

The traffic logs really tell the story:

At its peak, Tabulas was handling somewhere in the vicinity of 2,000,000 pageviews per month. It's not an amazing feat, but it was something to be proud of. Since then, traffic has been slowly dying, as I've been neglecting work on the site.

I took a peek at the SVN checkin logs for Tabulas, and they are atrocious. There will be a flurry of activity once every six months (as was the case this past weekend), but then, silence.

And sadly, most of the dev work since 2006 has been around infrastructure and code cleanup. In terms of new features and the way Tabulas is positioned, it's been stuck in a quagmire since '06.

It's tough to watch sites like Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter execute on strategy that slowly bleeds the community out of a project like this. Of course, part of the problem is that people simply grow up - the core community users who led to its widespread adoption don't blog as actively as they used to, and that always hurts. Tabulas never replenished with fresh members (which is what Facebook has been very good at doing, every year or two).

While I try not to be regretful of the decisions I've made, I question my decision making when it came to abandoning projects like Audiomatch and Tabulas. Looking back, had I been a little more mature in my decision making, I would have not taken the success of Tabulas so lightly; I would have hired a team, gotten some money, and taken a real crack at succeeding in that space.

So what's next? I don't know. Like always, Tabulas sits in a purgatory - I'm too proud of it to sell it, but too time-starved to do any meaningful work on it.

I do know that I immensely enjoyed hacking on Tabulas this past weekend - it was a refreshing change of scenery from dealing with real adult-like issues from work. I've mapped out a few ideas I want to pursue for Tabulas - being able to hack out a whole user directory in ~300 lines of code and in a day gave me encouragement that the code I've written for Tabulas isn't complete crap.

I mean, the work I did this weekend looks pretty good and is pretty functional:

I know I want to finish accomplishing the "dream" of Tabulas: a site which lets you share your stories, and where you can be exposed to the stories of other people.

So even if I'm exhausted from work, or I don't feel like hacking, I think I'll force myself (for this month and August) to work on Tabulas. That will be my goal.

Out of curiosity, for those of you are still using Tabulas ... why? I mean, some of you, I know, are stuck here by personal connections ... but is that all Tabulas has left going for it? (/me is geniunely curious) I know I still use it because it still beats the pants off of WordPress & LiveJournal in terms of personal publishing, but maybe there's something new that's better? (Tumblr doesn't count)

Oliver rockin' the Tabulas t-shirt.