aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, February 15, 2008

Lingering blog issues

I’m aware that there are ongoing residual problems that remain as a result of last week’s crash of this blog. There are some display issues, but the biggest issue is that you cannot leave comments. I am trying to get these problems resolved. I am also trying to rebuild the archive and develop a long-term strategy for moving forward. 

I hate that my blog is hobbling along. Through it all I have considered quitting, but I have also come to understand how much this blog means to me. I’m totally swept up in my ability to follow and interact with the news, those who report the news, and the newsmakers. I like that from right here in rural Georgia I can be part of the process and the ecosystem that is media at the start of the 21st century.

Significantly, though, I’m learning through this experience that along with the empowerment comes some complicated responsibilities to negotiate. My blog host is in Hong Kong. My designer in Wisconsin. The software from somewhere in the cloud. Much of what is going on with my blog right now is out of my control.

Because I host it myself, you’d think I would have that control. I have a tech team I can draw on; you’d think I could direct them. For a number of reasons, I cannot. I’ve thought, then, that maybe I should take this opportunity to move to a hosted blog option. After all, there’s power in numbers.

danah boyd tells a Google horror story that puts the kibosh to that:

Earlier this week, Bob received a notice that there was a spam problem in his Orkut community. The message was in English and it looked legitimate and so he clicked on it. He didn’t realize that he’d fallen into a phisher’s net until it was too late. His account was hijacked for god-knows-what-purposes until his account was blocked and deleted. He contacted Google’s customer service and their response basically boiled down to “that sucks, we can’t restore anything, sign up for a new account.” Boom! No more email, no more calendar, no more Orkut, no more gChat history, no more Blogger, no more anything connected to his Google account.

::gasp:: My heart threatens to attack my throat at the mere idea of losing four years worth of email. ::shudder:: Or what if this blog disappeared? Like, OMG. {insert horror film music here}

Bob’s story has a happy ending, because Bob is well connected. But what if he were me? I’m not well-connected so I’d have no protection.

The bottom line is: please bear with me. I hope to have comments back soon!