Last week, I pulled the plug on logstripper. Today, I’m announcing my plans of bringing it back as a new service.

The primary reason I pulled logstripper is that I didn’t feel as if it was still used all that much, or valued by anyone but a small group of people. However, I’ve had a lot of great feedback both in comments on the original post as well as through email, which has showed me there’s definite interest in it still.

One of the reasons I love programming is because it allows me to build stuff that makes other people’s lives better. It could be something complex and life changing, but sometimes, great joy can be found in the little things as well. Right now I feel as though bringing something akin to logstripper back could really touch some people’s lives, which, as a programmer, fills me with a lot of energy and desire to spend time and effort on such a project.

There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.

– Phil Karlton

My idea is to start by launching a very simple service, one not too different from the old logstripper. For now, I’ve settled on the name archiver for it, which I think is fitting and sounds a little nicer than logstripper.

Archiver will in it’s first stage just allow you to upload a log, and then allow you to filter out a few items such as lines containing certain words or lines containing text in between (( and )) brackets. The idea is not to have a very sophisticated filtering algorithm, but just to get something workable up and running in not too much time.

Eventually I would like it to be capable of doing a lot more, but we’ll see how this turns out first.