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."
So, netcraft confirmed that *weblogs are dying?
The real question is whether or not this is allowed in the TOS. If it is, well than, that's how the cookie crumbles, users should have been making backups.
If it is not allowed by the TOS than users have a right to be outraged.
The Technonaut
Why would you trust any hosting company to keep the only copy of your data, if it were all that important to you?
When your data is on someone else's servers, and you don't have any of that data properly backed up, then you are completely at their mercy when it comes to being able to use it or losing it entirely. This is especially true when the service that they are supplying is being provided for free.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
So let me get this straight... He didn't know even 1 day in advance that rising costs and other technical/logistical difficulties were going to force him to shut down service? That seems rather ridiculous and is a huge oversight on his part. To not even warn people that he was having difficulties... it's mind boggling. I'm sure someone would have come to his aid, or at least tried to organize a fund to assist in maintaining service.
Honestly, though... to not see this coming even a few days in advance? That's very disappointing.
I can forsee quite a few people complaining about this in their weblogs.
Oh...wait...
Having your blogging service totally shut you out without notice finally seems like the perfect thing to blog about.
- sm
Jesus saves and backs up nightly!
It's as though a couple of thousand babbling idiots were suddenly silenced.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
From the Wired article: "I just have my fingers crossed that my girlfriend gets her blog back," said software programmer Tom Gortell. "She feels like someone just sucked out her brains. I don't get it, it's just an online journal, right? But she feels like her entire life has been stolen."
The guy works as a programmer and he never told her to make backups? And then he tells Wired that he doesn't get why she is upset. Somebody better e-mail him the number of a good florist.
But seriously, he should have told her to make backups. Free service. You get what you pay for. What more can you say?
People couldn't type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.
Provided people ask in a specific, formulaic manner which betrays no unhappiness at the decision. Power trip? Uhhyep.
-PS
"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
At least LiveJournal didn't shut down without notice. Otherwise we'd all be up tonight digging mass graves for disfranchised teenagers all over the world.
Considering that the majority of the data is displayed on users' browsers, they could have shut down the sites but allowed the owners of the blogs to grab the data. It would probably have been less traffic in the few days before shutdown then normal traffic.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Honestly, the amount of snarky comments along the lines of 'Oh, blogs suck anyway, who cares.', and 'It's all idiotic blabbing anyway.' are getting on my nerves. Really, no one thinks you're one of the cool kids now just because you think blogs are passe. Stop trying to be a post-ironic hipster type who's oh-so-tired of it all. Posting on Slashdot won't get you laid. Neither will having a blog, of course, but that's my point.
I don't understand the level of hostility against blogs. No one's putting a gun to your head and making you read them. I actually support efforts by Google and other search engines to separate blog results from regular webpage results. Sometimes I don't want to have my search results skewed by blogs, and sometimes I really want to know how the 'blogosphere' feels about a particular issue. But while that happens, just ignore them. If you hate them so much, don't read them. But, really, infantile attacks don't make you superior in any way to the bloggers.
I know most blogs are, indeed, just self-centered rambling, or 15 year old girls talking about their latest dream with N'Sync and a pony, but on the other hand, they're valid outlets for a lot of people to just vent, express themselves, and give their opinions on issues. If you don't want to hear those opinions, then just don't visit their blogs. It's that simple.
And yes, I do have a blog of my own, no, I'm not giving out the address here, since it's basically just a self-centered little website that's read by me and maybe 2 friends, and that's fine by me.
"Two things are infinite: the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the first one." - Albert Einstein
Reading the quotes from the article it may not be that cut and dried.
A single person doesn't donate his work to running a service for 4 years then just drop people for the hell of it.
The quotes above sound like he had other intense stuff going on in his life ......things with a higher priority....that forced him to put off dealing with this in a better manner.
Maybe people wouldn't be angry at him if he mentioned the details of these extenuating circumstances, but then again why should he publish the personal details of his life? I'm sure anyone here can imagine several situations to make a hobby project you run the last thing on your list of priorities: a significant death, loss of a job, being forced to move, 1 or more of other things called "life" etc.
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 used to "blog" before the term and the software. I just updated a personal website I had rather frequently.
Steve
3,000 people is nothing compared to a Slashdot flood. The blogs are small. He could have easily shut it down to the general populace, and left it open only to the owners of the existing blogs. It wouldn't have been more traffic then normal.
Yes, it was free. No, you can't do anything about it. And yes, it was still and asshole thing to do.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
To all saying users should backup their blogs...
Exactly how are they supposed to do this?
A fundamental weakness in the blog paradigm is that there is CGI software between you and your raw data, in order to impose a style on it. This is particularly true of third party hosting, which provides cookie-cuter blogs through common software, where the only thing that differes from user to user is a few settings and their URL.
Backups usually only make sense if (1) you can get at the raw, preformatted data, and (2) that getting at that data will do you any good -- e.g. you will be able to externalize it the same way somewhere else.
At this point, blog-hosting service providers really don't have standards for their variable data, so even if you had a backup, it really wouldn't get your blog back up on the net, without a lot of work.
-- Terry
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
I remember the day when my Livejournal had been totally wiped. Emptied. Back to square one. I sat there dumbfounded, what had happened to my months of entries? I'm not the only one I've seen this happen to.. I guess all you can really do is move on. Losing data sucks.. Be more rigorous in backing up next time and hopefully it won't happen again.
I've lost unreplacable data a few times now (sometimes on my machine, sometimes on someone else's servers). I should have learned my lesson sooner. Even if it *shouldn't* happen, it does happen. Sucks facing hard immovable reality sometimes.
Note: I decided not to call them "logs", because that word has already gained use online and offline, so we need a way to distinguish which ones are online.
No no, Slashdot is still up. :P
How 'bout after each post, go to the blog, then go to file->save as...
It will be HTML, but it could be restored fairly easily by opening the html file in a web browser and copying and pasting into a new blog's post page in another browser window.
It would be inconvenient, but not as hard as you make it out to be.
Anyway, visit my blog. There is a link in the sig. I try to write about interesting things like life on other planets and token-ring adapters rather than just posting the typical masturbatory grousing you find in most other blogs.
Unknown host pong.
There. Now you're up to speed.
These are blogs. The owners are the ones reading them.
Locking out the owners and only allowing guests would probably cut the bandwidth usage by about 95%.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I'm concerned to hear that Dave Winer is suffering from health problems. Whatever you think of him and his various endeavors, Dave has been incredibly influential in the Macintosh software and Internet development communities for about as long as I can remember. Incredibly productive, too. I won't try to list all the stuff he's done, but we've all used the fruits of his labor. And he hasn't filed a single patent for any of it.
So screw the blogs and give Dave a break. If there's anyone out there who has earned a bit of understanding, Dave's the guy.
Speedy recovery to you, Dave.
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?
If it's still in the same rack as it was 6 months ago, that is. I used to work for a web hosting company that had some co-lo space in a hosting facility. We set up 2 of the servers for weblogs.com as well as another server for another site. I never met Dave, but did everything through his partner. His partner was a super-nice guy, Linux afficianado, and slashdot reader. Kinda sad that they ran out of money.
(I have to be a bit vague on the details due to NDAs and such... Sorry for not including any specifics)
I don't understand the level of hostility against blogs. No one's putting a gun to your head and making you read them.
Apparantly you haven't tried to use Google lately.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
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."
Winer argued that it would have been impossible to perform backups, it would have overwhelmed the system if he'd preannounced the closure, it would have killed his system from overload.
I call Bullshit.
Notice this handy feature on the Harvard weblog host site created by Winer:
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/weblogBackup
You just submit the request, and your backup runs overnight, presumably it's a cron job to tar all your files (or the Windoze equivalent, since Winer seems stuck on Windoze platform).
So Winer was lying when he said it would have been impossible to offer backups without shutting down the whole system like he did. Software was already written to perform backups. He could have just made the blog webspaces read-only, so blog authors could no longer post new content, but the blogs could still be available to the public, until they got backed up. This transition was handled extremely poorly, it must have been a deliberate decision to do it this way. Dave apparently WANTED to piss everyone off.
Dave Winer says "I don't want to start a site hosting business." As far as I can tell, there is no way to "upgrade" to keep a weblogs.com site; the best you could do is move to a different provider.
Or entirely not like that at all.
- c -
Personal pages with no content of intrest to anyone have been around since the early days of the web. However they existed in their own little corner and were rarely found by search engines. Blogs because of the incestious linking to each other are found and are just another chunk of noise getting in the way.
Not that I hate blogs. It is just, ugh. I thought I found the information I wanted and instead I am on some whiners site. What a waste of time and bandwidth.
Now if only google could filter out blogs. Then all the personal sites would go back to their own little corner of the net and I wouldn't know anything about them. Of course if this is done then a lot of bloggers would whine because they would miss the accidental visits and see that in reality nobody wants to read about their thoughts. You gotta be intrestting to have something intrestting to say and most people simply are not.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
That's an unnecessary "or."
Yes, blogs do have their uses - say, group collaboration. FLOSS. But there are a fascinating number of them that are just self-important rant-books with no real direction.
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..
March 1997, one of my little weekly columns (didn't call them "blogs" back then) gets a mention in Us. Unfortunately I'd been hosting it in donated /~username space, and right after the magazine puts the blurb to bed, the owners of the bookstore hosting my site decide they don't want to run a server anymore.
No warning, no forwarding, no nothing. I have everything backed up, so I register a domain, get hosting, and my site's back online within a few days... only at another address. I'm running around trying to update my entries at all the major search engines, posting to appropriate newsgroups, just trying to get the word out that my columns had moved.
Then Us comes out, glowing little blurb recommending my column... and the *old* URL. My first major national press and no one can find me.
That is the most insidious part of what Winer has done. He has separated all those bloggers from their readers, leaving them no way to leave a forwarding address. Anyone who doesn't backup their content takes their chances, but how do you backup your audience?
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
Seems more like parallel murder to me, since it all happened at once...
That seems to be a pretty common opinion of Dave. yet countless people decided it was a good idea to host their blog on a site operated by what would seem to be, by accounts like this, a madman!! Why on earth would you not expect your blog to just vanish someday, or have your words of wisdom turned into latin or something? Why would you host a blog there at all?
If the answer starts with "well, it was free..." then you get everything you deserve. I have plenty of my own "Well, it was {free,cheap}" experiences and although I grumbled about it a little in the end I could only blame my own human nature for trying to get something for nothing.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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
"Only in such a sick culture could the terms of a contract take precedence over common courtesy. It would've cost him so much to give people a couple of days to get their shit in order?"
You can also look at TOS vs. common courtesy the other way around:
No matter what the TOS said, if you are/were getting free service, and this service is provided by an individual whose circumstances have changed and are outside his control, use your common courtesy and accept that your blog is now gone.
Like other have said:
1. if your blog is so important, why didn't you back it up?
2. why trust an individual (or a company) with your precious data and trust them with the only copy of your data
Simpy
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"
First, I notice that many of these posts say that "3000 bloggers" have lost their sites. This is just not true. I know that at least three of these sites were mine. I created them for various purposes, they ran their course, and when I was through with them I let them go to seed. I'm sure that I'm not the only one to do so. I lost nothing when they were shut down. In fact, my contact information was not current, so Winer would not have been able to contact me if he had tried. I'll bet that I'm not alone in THAT respect, either.
/. posts from people saying that they lost their own sites when Winer pulled the plug. (Although I have to say that the posts here are downright sedate compared to the people at http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/002739.h tml, who seriously need to go back on their meds.)
Second, as many people pointed out, these accounts didn't cost me a dime, and they didn't make Winer a dime. There were no ads on the sites. Winer didn't harvest my email to sell to spammers, and he didn't spam me myself. I got a hell of a lot more than Winer did. I got the use of his site for four years. I got the opportunity to experiment with weblogs. I got the use of a first-class weblogging system. Winer's software is far and away the best system that I've tried. The themes were professional and well-designed, the software was intuitive and a pleasure to use, and the response time was usually exceptional. Going from Userland to another system -- Blogger, for example -- was like going from OS X to Windows 3.1. (Brrrr.)
It was a free service that went on long after the Internet bubble burst and other free services disappeared. It was fun while it lasted. Could Winer have done a better job of weaning people off the system? Maybe. I don't know, and neither do you.
Oddly enough, I don't recall any
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