Slashdot Mirror
Hosting Service Closes 3000 Blogs Without Notice
marmoset writes "Citing the high costs of running the free service, performance
concerns, and health problems, Dave Winer closed down the weblogs.com
hosting service without any prior notice. As many as 3000 sites are now inacessible, and
the users who want to transfer their data elsewhere have to ask
(politely) for it to be exported. As might be expected, reactions range from understanding
to
enraged.
Netcraft has a report, too."
Wired has an article up as well, with a bit more detail.
--The more you know, the less you know.
maybe they should search the google cache?
I've got many a dead page from google cache it works wonders, well unless it's hosting service goes down again.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Especially since Sourceforge points out to anyone starting a new project, very clearly, that they are responsible for backing up all of their project's data.
Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
[People whining because their free beer was turned off] > Now imagine this was SourceForge... And that is what mirrors are for... http://mirror.optusnet.com.au/ http://ftp.heanet.ie/ etc, as Google will tell you. Plus, hopefully a good project manager does not trust a free service for a non-trivial project. Code backups anyone?
If you read the Netcraft article, you would have seen that he had problems other than just technical problems. He seems to have health problems too. Maybe that's the real reason why he needed to shut it down. Maybe someone nice with a few gigs to spare would make a nice offer to host the whole thing?
Who needs a couple of hundred lines of anything, let alone PHP?
Just download blosxom. 100 lines of code. Works with any ISP, even if you don't have CGI.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
also, many of the clients that interface with the LJ servers can pull all the posts, comments, and other data.
Coincidentally we are launching a blog backup service shortly. We'll back up blogs so that users won't have to worry about their content if their service goes down or *gasp* goes out of business!
Blog Backup Program
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
Fundraising isn't the issue. Winer's a millionaire, he just sold his house in CA. According to the Wired Magazine biography of Winer, he paid $2 million for a house in an exclusive neighborhood, next to Joan Baez's house. Winer is sitting on millions of bucks, it's not like he couldn't afford to pay for hosting. He just decided he no longer wanted to, so he killed the blogs of everyone who wasn't his buddy (i.e. Searls). So if you haven't sucked up to Winer sufficiently, your blog is toast. Such are the tribulations of dealing with millionaire dilletantes.
Winer is freaking out. His "fellowship" at Berkman is over, he's got no job and nobody wants him around anymore, even his sycophants are no longer willing to help him find his next gig.
Hrrm.. I imagine that that would have only ever happened as a mistake - never as an unannounced delibrate action. I cannot imagine Brad being as unrepentent and arrogant as Dave here. (Another /.er has said that Dave apparently has quite a reputation for arrogance.)
LJ is a completely different level of outfit - their scale is huge. They also created and released (the open source) memcached, now a standard way of accellerating databases on very heavy traffic'd sites.
Anyway, there is finally a livejournal backup program - downloads your LJ to your local computer.
It's much more informative than the web page. The guy basically says he is too sick to maintain the server and will export the blogs on request. For me, it sounds like people should either a) say thanks for a freeby they had for a while, export their stuff and move on or b) offer to host all or a portion of the sites and provide a legal privacy guarantee for moving the accounts.
Something that slashdot owners should consider, huh?
Here's the link:
Blosxom
I've used Blosxom, and it pretty much rocks. I haven't used the latest version, with the plug in architecture, but it looks sweet.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Manila (the software used on weblogs.com) has an export feature for exactly this purpose. (I just backed up my site right now. Luckily it wasn't on weblogs.com.)
Dave Winer has written in the past about why it's import for Web apps to export data: "So since we're going to have competition, I believe we must take extra steps to guarantee that there's no customer lock-in. It's even more important in the age of the Web when the user might not even have a copy of their own data. One of the cardinal requirements of this market, even before we try to get the UIs compatible, is an export function that leaves un-rendered text and data on the user's hard disk in a format readable by software that's available at a reasonable or no cost."
His reason for putting this in audio was that he believes nobody reads "essays" and that this is a better way to convey and explain this type of idea/message.
... hum ... hum ... huh ... and huh ... so ... huh ..." in there that this is not the case and we would all have been better off if he just wrote it. He also sounds pretty bored. Dave, please type it next time!
Ironically, he has so many "huh
- sigs are for wimps.
A single person doesn't donate his work to running a service for 4 years then just drop people for the hell of it.
He was the CEO of Userland, the company that offered this service. The Userland company has been split into two parts, and this service is being abandoned. Dave, instead of telling people about this, tried to shift the weblogs onto a substandard server quietly. Mid-move, he realised the server wasn't up to it, and dumped the weblogs he didn't like.
Now all the data is locked up on his server and you have to ask nicely to get it back in a fortnight's time. Dave is in the habit of blowing up at people if he thinks they aren't on his side, so nobody who has data they want back dare raise their voice lest they lose it all.
Dave Winer is not a reasonable man. They may well have been extenuating circumstances, but he's acted like an asshole for years and nobody is willing to give him the benefit of the doubt forever.
If you use LiveJournal, there is a command-line based client called Charm and one of its features is the ability to archive old posts.
If you're worried about losing all your old posts, go ahead and back them up yourself. You never know..
>Le Temps Detruit Tout
"Time destroys everything"
So, as far as I can tell from the discussion, he tried running stuff on his own server for a bit instead of Userland. I'm going to guess that his bandwidth usage for this month exceeded whatever he purchased for the month -- this would explain why he's refusing to provide any access until the first of next month, when he's sending people's blogs back to them.
Of course, that doesn't explain why he'd use an audio message to get the word out.
May we never see th
For those that state that weblogs are gay... WTF do you think Slashdot is?!
Don't look now, but everyone here is blogging! SSShhhhhhhhh!
It sure as hell isn't the New York Times!
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Which is why redirect URLs are handy, especially for cheapskates like me. I host my website on various free services, but I've kept the same CJB.net URL for some time now. That's what I link to, that's where people go even if I move to another domain (so long as I update the forwarding, of course).
In Soviet Russia, TV watches you!
well, the guy certainly has no problems linking to an AUDIO POST hosted on HARVARDS EXPENSE.
he just created something he doesn't want to a) take care of b) give to somebody else.
-
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
May 17, 2004 UserLand Software, Inc., the venerable weblogging and web content management company, today announced the execution of a transaction whereby certain of its assets and operations were acquired by a new corporate entity. The new company, UserLand Corporation, acquired the assets and operations of UserLand Software related to the products Manila and Radio UserLand, plus the "UserLand" brand name and website. The new company will operate under the name "UserLand Software".
As he's said (just in case, you know, a few Slashdotter's don't actually know what they're talkng about because they don't read anything beyond /.'s well-spun lede), the blogs were hosted on servers belonging to Userland, the California corporation Winer founded but left two years ago after heart bypass surgery. Userland apparently recently cleaned its corporate house, letting go of several activities and interests that they were supporting but which do not, and will not, bring in any revenue. That included the blogs.
Winer seems to have wanted to migrate the blogs to Cambridge, Mass, where he is now a visiting fellow at Harvard. However, when he loaded up a server with the blogs, it turned to molasses. (If memeory serves, they run on a Windows server.)
The obvious solution was to buy more hardware and spread the blogs among several servers. I can't really blame Winer for not doing that: He'd become a defacto freebie hosting service (there are no ads on these free sites, so no chance for any revenue); he'd need to hire staff to perform the migrations and manage the servers (his comments clearly indicated that the doctors have told him to stay away from the stress of programming and admin'ing); and he's about to leave Harvard and move elsewhere.
As far as the TOS goes, I once briefly used another free Userland/Winer blogging facility and, I believe, those TOS clearly indicated that there the sites were hosted, in effect, at the pleasure of Userland. They made no claims about support, uptime, or lifetime.
That said, the notice to the users was very abrupt. We don't know if this had been in the works for weeks or for hours. If the decision to take down the sites was made weeks ago, then the notice to users should have been given weeks ago. If the decision was made abruptly, everyone was left holding the bag.
Perhaps a better solution would have been for Userland to send out the shutdown notices and for no one to make any attempt to keep the sites alive.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
In fact, if you look back through Google history a bit, you'll see that Dave gave his weblog software Manila away for free for a year or two, then suddenly jacked the price up to $899 a year subscription fee. That change was without notice too. So it's not like he hasn't pulled this kind of shit before.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
BTW, I only heard the term "blog" within the last 2 years, yet one of the quotes from the article said this guy ran weblog for 4 years.
Is the term "blog" newer then this guy's service?
I started my first weblog with Pyra's (now Google's) Blogger service in December 1999, and people were certainly calling them "blogs" by then. IIRC Blogger started in spring 1999, but I'm not sure how or if the birth of the Blogger service coincides with the general usage of the term "blog".
Heck is a place for people who don't believe in Gosh.
If you don't want to interact with the fellow who shut the blogs down (I've promised to never say his name in print again for the same reason the Indo-European root of "bear" is actually "brown"), I've written a short and sweet way to extract all of your blog posts in somewhat ugly but complete form using Google.
Essentially, enter a Google query in the form
site:YOURDOMAIN.weblogs.com UNIQUE_WORD
Unique word should be something that appears on every page. Now get one of those slurping programs that downloads Web pages. Point it to the Google URL and set it to one level deep. It'll retrieve all the pages via Google's Cached link. repeat for each page of Google results. Now you have your content, and if you've clever, you can write a shell script to extract the unique text and eventually recreate your blog without any "bear" involved.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others