Hosting Service Closes 3000 Blogs Without Notice 617
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 article (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Backups? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Newsflash... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Newsflash... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Newsflash... (Score:2, Informative)
Health problems... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Informative)
Just download blosxom. 100 lines of code. Works with any ISP, even if you don't have CGI.
Re:Wired article (Score:3, Informative)
Blogging pioneer Dave Winer unexpectedly closed Weblogs.com, his free blog-hosting service, on Sunday, leaving thousands of bloggers without access to their blogs.
Blogs affected by the shutdown now redirect to a generic message posted by Winer.
Wireless Hot Spot Directory
Today's the Day. Some bloggers are screaming that the shutdown is a serial "blog murder." Other bloggers slammed the people whose blogs have vanished from the Internet, saying that no one should expect continuity from a free service.
"Oh boo hoo
"So because it's free, people should bite their tongues about having their content wiped off the face of the earth with no warning?" responded another blogger, posting anonymously. "He couldn't even give them 30 minutes' notice to back stuff up?"
And many bloggers simply posted messages thanking Winer for the memories and politely requested a copy of their blog's contents.
In an audio message posted late Monday explaining his reasons for the shutdown, Winer cited the financial costs of hosting the sites, technical difficulties in moving the blogs to a new server, stress and personal health issues as the reasons for the sudden shutdown.
Winer, who has offered free hosting to bloggers for the past four years, has promised to make exportable copies of blog contents available to the blogs' owners at their request. He says it will take at least two weeks to provide copies of the blogs' contents.
Meanwhile, the affected bloggers cannot access their work, a situation that angers many, who said they believed they should have been given advance notice that the Weblogs service would be terminated before their sites became inaccessible.
"The transition for the bloggers and the readers would have been far smoother and less painful if they had been warned," wrote David Weinberger, author of the Cluetrain Manifesto, on his blog. "(But) Dave's point in his audio blog is that the transition wouldn't have been smooth from the host's point of view, and that a sudden cut-off was necessary.
"Second, why the two-week wait? That's going to be painful for the thousands of bloggers, many of whom are my friends," Weinberger continued. "Again, I assume that Dave is correctly estimating the amount of work it will take to package up several thousand sites. If I thought he were either incompetent or making people wait out of meanness, I'd flame him."
"I just did the best I could," said Winer, in his audio message. "This is not a company here
Winer also added in his audio message that he believed no matter how he had handled the shutdown, people would have complained.
"On the Internet
But some bloggers said that a little advance notice was all they asked of Winer.
"This can't be a sudden whim, Dave had to know this was in the works." said blogger Nancy Velton. "I'd have appreciated a chance to make copies of my material, and move my blog to another service. My entire life is in that blog."
Winer, a founder of Userland software, a provider of website and weblog publishing tools for organizations and individuals, had been hosting the blogs on Userland's servers. He left the company several years ago. After a recent change of management, U
Re:To all saying users should backup their blogs.. (Score:2, Informative)
also, many of the clients that interface with the LJ servers can pull all the posts, comments, and other data.
Blog backup service. (Score:3, Informative)
Blog Backup Program [rage.net]
-- Greg
Re:Umm... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Livejournal Backup.. (Score:2, Informative)
LJ is a completely different level of outfit - their scale is huge. They also created and released (the open source) memcached [danga.com], now a standard way of accellerating databases on very heavy traffic'd sites.
Anyway, there is finally a livejournal backup program [yamnet.co.uk] - downloads your LJ to your local computer.
Listen to audio notes (Score:5, Informative)
Something that slashdot owners should consider, huh?
Re:before the winer-hating starts... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Informative)
Blosxom [blosxom.com]
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.
Manila supports backup (Score:5, Informative)
Dave Winer has written in the past about why it's import for Web apps to export data [scripting.com]: "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."
When you can't speak in public, please type it! (Score:3, Informative)
Ironically, he has so many "huh
Re:Choice quotes from the wired article (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Archive old entries (Score:5, Informative)
If you're worried about losing all your old posts, go ahead and back them up yourself. You never know..
Re:[OT] Your sig... (Score:2, Informative)
"Time destroys everything"
My guess at what happened (Score:5, Informative)
Of course, that doesn't explain why he'd use an audio message to get the word out.
Blogs are gay? (Score:3, Informative)
Don't look now, but everyone here is blogging! SSShhhhhhhhh!
It sure as hell isn't the New York Times!
Re:New URLs Suck (Score:3, Informative)
Re:TOS (Score:5, Informative)
he just created something he doesn't want to a) take care of b) give to somebody else.
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Was it really Dave Winer? (Score:2, Informative)
A Little Perspective... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:The funny thing about that to me... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Choice quotes from the wired article (Score:2, Informative)
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".
Easy way to get weblogs.com content back: Google (Score:5, Informative)
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.