Category: Geek Love

On a side note, if your site has to be down, at least go down with the best, right? InstaPundit (hosted with Hosting Matters) was offline too, and according to Kathy K, he was posting on his backup Blogspot site. Solonor (hosted with Bloggerzone) was kind enough to share visual evidence of how long the site was down. Meanwhile, Michele claims it was really her doing – a powerful Jedi Mind Trick gone wrong.

At least it wasn’t as stressful for me as the Great Blogout of 2002 (see the April 4th post). We were so desparate then that we had to set up a Blogaholics site. This hit more people, but at least I knew what was going on and it was just a matter of waiting it out!

Have details to share from the Great Blogout of 2003? What did you do with all of the spare time you suddenly found yourself with today?

From about 9:30am this morning until an hour or so ago, Blogomania, a lot of the Blogomania client sites (five out of seven servers), and all of my personal sites were offline. No e-mail, no blogs, nothing. At first I thought it was my wonky connection through my ISP, but it wasn’t. Oh no, it was much bigger than that. It seems that NAC, the huge data center that stores servers for a number of hosting companies had a rather unusual situation on their hands today. Here’s the full scoop:

At 10:20 am EST this morning, we had a component failure in the UPS at our Site B co-location facility in Parsippany, NJ. We had no warning of this failure, and we are currently investigating the cause. This failure triggered the fire alarms and the fire suppression system, and caused the UPS unit to drop all power to Site B. In addition, because this failure caused the fire alarms to be set off, the entire building had to be evacuated while the fire department investigated. NAC personnel worked with the fire department to ensure the building environment was safe to re-enter.

Some of the core switching equipment in Parsippany was affected by this UPS failure and power outage and had to be moved to a backup power system. At approximately 12:00pm EST the fire department allowed all personal to re-enter the building. … We are currently assessing any on-going issues, but most services have been restored. We will post an additional update as more information becomes available.

Blogomania has clients on five servers – Themis, Zephyros, Clio, Calliope and Artemis – at this location. Clients on the other two servers – Iris and Selene – are in Florida, where all of the servers are eventually migrating. Sort of like birds, heading South!

Thanks to Jennifer and Erika for helping me to spread the word about the situation. It is a rather helpless feeling when you are dealing with a situation like this that is so absolutely out of your control, and I’m so thankful to finally be back online!

Ok, more like an old kid with a new name and a new look – for the PHP lovers out there, WordPress, the new official branch of b2, is now available for download.

Kudos to Matt for a job well done. I can’t wait to test the latest version, and I’m proud of my very minor role in all of it.

Trust me, this one is going places. Keep an eye on it!

(In case you wondered, it will run at Blogomania and has already been tested on our servers.)

What a fantastic idea! Blogrolling and Blogshares have joined forces so that you can set up – easily – a blogroll of all of the sites you have invested in and the people that have invested in yours. You can read all about it at BlogRolling News. Sweet! (Another thing to add to my long to do list!) [via J-Mo]

I sort of slid my reference to TechTV and Sarah’s Blog Report in to my hacker post last night. You see, Sarah had written in her report that you should just steal other blog owners CSS and code.

Uh, NO. Not unless you want someone to go carnival freak crazy on you. (Yes, I love that line and I’m abusing it today.)

Several people, including Kristine, Melissa and myself, contact Tech TV and complained about the article. How could Tech TV allow someone to say on their sites that it is ok to steal code? (She even titled the section “Steal, Steal, Steal” … no, don’t, don’t, don’t.)

Now parts of the article are changed. There is a message to “Chill out, it’s just research”. No, Sarah, if you were suggesting that I look at code and then create my own – that’s research. Taking it outright and using it is stealing. Then she added that “Stealing stuff pisses people off”. Gee, glad you noticed that.

I don’t agree with her statement that her tips are a great way to help you understand how MT works. CSS has nothing to do with MT and only helps you figure out how to lay things out on the page.

And it’s mighty generous of her to tell people to steal her blog’s code – since it’s a Blogplates design that she doesn’t give credit.