One More Reason to Use BLogger

Weblogs.Com, a Manilla-based free BLogging system similar to Blogger, which powers our site, has gone dark. The owner apparently has found the costs of maintaining a free blogging system to be beyond his abilities to provide in the long-term, as many free sites on the Net have also found. (i.e. Try finding free e-mail of a POP3 or IMAP nature on the web nowadays. Almost impossible, since the companies need the ad revenue that webmail allows.) This would not be an overly controversial move - after all, many free web services have gone dark - except that appartently no warning was given.

[U]sers protested that they had no warning of the shutdown, and thus were unable to download copies of their sites, including user comments. Winer said he will export a site's content if its owner makes a specific request, but would not do so before July 1....One Weblogs.com blogger whose site is still operating is Doc Searls, a senior editor of Linux Journal and widely read blogger. "Thousands of us got a free ride from Dave, and Userland, over the past five years," wrote Searls. "What we got was far more than we didn't pay for. For many of us (certainly for me), the benefits have been incalculable. Let's keep that in mind as those of us involved try to make this transition over the next few weeks."..."It's not okay for 3,000 weblogs to revert to a post by the software vendor one day without warning," wrote Jeneane Sessum.

One more reason we are glad to be with BLogger.Com. This is a tough case, because you can not blame the guy for shutting down the service for cost reasons - heck, Apple shut down the free aspects of their .Mac service and they are a for-profit company rolling in the dough. But leaving 3000 people with no way to access their own work - much of it the product of hours of blood, sweat, and tears - is a hard sell, even if there is a way to get an export "if you are nice about it." Guess Ward and I should be checking into how to make regular offline backups of this site, just in case.