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."
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.
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
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.
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?
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."
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..
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
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.
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"
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