For those of you who have wondered what is going on, Blogger had a system-wide failure beginning sometime yesterday, which froze blogspot.com blogs as reader-only.
The failure resulted from a maintenance upgrade on Wednesday. (Small quirk of fate, the blog manager at Google who was responsible for the maintenance upgrade was a high school friend. I realized this when checking Google’s entries on the outage. So the silver lining is that I may reconnect with someone who knew me when.)
Google reset the system to just before the upgrade, meaning that all posts and comments from around 11 a.m. Wednesday were taken down. Google says that it backed-up that data and will restore the posts and comments, but that hasn’t happened yet.
I saved everything in pdf. format so it the posts are lost, I’ll go through the hassle of re-posting two days’ worth of stuff, but hopefully that will not be necessary.
This brings up another point that I was not going to discuss until next month, but this is a good chance to preview something. Prior to this outage I started working with a blog design team to move away from Blogger to a custom and hosted website. This has been something about which I have been thinking for a long time, as you know.
So, sometime before July 4, if things go according to plan even sooner, you will see an updated version of Legal Insurrection, with all of the content migrated. It will be simple, not complicated, and fast.
In many ways, you will not notice much of a difference on the home page, except that there will be less clutter. For those who like the current blog experience, nothing much will change. Comments to posts will continue to be moderated, at least for the near future.
There will be some features off the home page which will enable us to interact more freely, and also to focus on specific political races, issues, etc. for those who want to participate.
So I’m back in business. And planning to stay that way.
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Comments
Well, I slept while it was down!
Plus, I was able to get a hilarious post out of it. The freaks at Lawyers, Guns and Money have been deleting my comments mentioning Tintin at Sadly No!, who's been outed as failed New York actor Carl Salonen. See, Blogger Outage Sucks Carl Salonen Exposé Down the Memory Hole!"
I think I might now be banned altogether over at LGM. They loved to attack me on the comments, but now that I've got the good they're putting the kibosh on any possible mention of Salonen at the threads.
Plausible deniability, I guess. Full lulz either way1
Glad you're considering moving to your own site.
With hosting so cheap, a domain costing nine bucks a year and WordPress templates blowing most custom designs out of the water, I've never understood those who stick with Blogger.
Good luck on the move.
Welcome back. I made new blogs on other platforms while it was down, but there truly is no place like home. I look forward to your new site, Professor, I'm sure it will be terrific.
Glad to see you back up, hell, nice to be back up myself. I actually think I started jonsin' from not being able to blog. Didn't realize it was addicting, just thought I was having fun, sheeeesh.
I am also interested in dumping Blogger. If you get the chance, please keep us informed of your progress on this move.
Yay!!! I noticed the outage…..I was having trouble posting to the blog.
Thanks for the information. Can't wait to see the new digs. We NEED you for 2012!!!!
By the time the rumors got here to the Left Coast (kids' game "Chinese Whispers" style) you were said to be last seen leaving George Soros's mansion, smiling and kissing a check, and jumping in a Prius stretch Limo plastered with crazy bumper stickers.
Be sure to redirect this site to you new site. I'm still debating about switching over to a hosted server.
Semper Fi and keep on keeping on.
Anyone keeping an eye on the happenings over at Althouse? At this point, who knows if its political, but….The tech support guy's responses should be in business textbooks under the "How to never, ever, treat clients/customers in a public setting–even if you think they're wrong (and/or know that they are an idiot" section. Treat a customer well and they'll tell a friend, treat 'em bad and they'll paint it across the internet.
Her backup site
@Cowboy Curtis – the Althouse problem appears to be that she was designated a spam blog. Who knows how that happened, but a concerted effort by people to hit the "report abuse" button at the top could have flagged the site. That once happened here a long time ago, and I received an e-mail warning that I had 48 hours to appeal or the blog would be removed. Fortunately I received the email and responded, but had I been away I would have returned to a defunct blog. Who knows if she was slammed by people upset with her Wisconsin coverage.
You had me worried this morning. For a while, it looked to me like I not only got myself banned from commenting, but from even reading this blog!
Since Google/Blogger owns the content of the blogs it hosts, it is counter-intuitive that conservatives don't maintain their private property rights over the content they create on their blogs by obtaining their own hosting and using WordPress. I am glad to hear you are making the move. I hope Prof. Althouse has sense enough to do the same.
The "spam blog" thing is Google's way of removing a blog with bad pointers that screw up the recovery, that is, they remove blogs with bad pointers by using the spam blog software path.
It's collateral damage caused by a technical shortcut.
It complicates the removed user's life considerably, however; and whether their blog ever comes back is a matter of some Google employee's willingness to go to the trouble, and the user's realization that he has to ask in the right places.