Archive for October, 2005

Wordpress.com “major drive failure”

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 31/10/2005
in Blogging, Business blogging, Technology and WordPress
. 4 Comments

I mentioned in a post earlier this morning that I was having problems accessing wordpress.com blogs - wordpress.com is a hosted multi-user version of the blog software I use, WordPress. The site is now available again but suffered a “major disk failure” according to a message on the wordpress.com Dashboard.

data loss message on Wordpress.com

The data loss is presumably because the drive which failed was not in a RAID array and the last backup of the site was a couple of days ago!

This is unforgivable. No matter how small a hosting organisation you are (and Wordpress.com couldn’t be considered small), your users data is sacrosanct. Users will tolerate occasional downtime but not loss of data.

Matt and the rest of the Wordpress.com team, you need to try to resurrect as much of your users data as possible (if you haven’t already done this), put the site on a RAID array, put a disaster recovery plan in place which ensures no data can ever be lost again and then try very hard to rebuild your now shattered reputation.

UPDATE:
MacManX alerted me, in the comments of this post, to the fact that Matt has put up a post about this issue. In the post, Matt explains what happened, how the WordPress.com team responded and that fact that no data was lost:

Donncha was on the ball and switched all the traffic to a recent backup so most things would work while we investigated the hardware failure. This means that an old version of your site was shown for a few hours.

A few minutes ago we restored the up-to-date database and we’re currently syncing it to the backup to get back any posts you might have made during the semi-downtime. Even though we were able to recover everything, we’re looking at ways to make things even more redundant, so if this ever happens again the problems will be measure in seconds or minutes

It is lucky for the Wordpress.com team that no data was lost, this will help people’s confidence in the platform. However, they need to get a RAID solution in place for the database (preferably with multiple RAID containers - 1 for OS, 1 for db and 1 for transaction logs) and a live backup db server in case of a logic board failure on the db server. Only at this level of redundancy will they be able to sleep at night and hand on heart be able to promise data integrity to Wordpress.com users.

Wordpress.com offline

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 31/10/2005
in Technology
. 1 Comment

I have been trying to browse sites on wordpress.com for the last few minutes but I am getting a 503 error message.

Anyone know what’s going on there?

503 error message on Wordpress.com

UPDATE:
D’oh! Somehow this post was posted twice - I have deleted the duplicate.

FURTHER UPDATE:
It looks like the wordpress.com site is back up but on Scoble’s site, at least, the last one or two days posts are missing. This certainly dents any confidence you would have in a hosted service. Occasional downtime is acceptable (barely - but you can understand it if a site is a victim of its own success) but loss of data is unacceptable - I can only hope that this too is temporary.

RSS usability problems re-discovered!

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 31/10/2005
in Blogging, Business blogging and RSS
. 4 Comments

Robert Scoble has written a post bemoaning the lack of standards in using RSS feeds and the consequent confusion which this causes :

Some sites use RSS icons. Most that I visit use the orange XML icon. But other sites don’t have any icon and instead use words like “subscribe� or “feed� or “web feed.�

There’s a great discussion in the comments of Robert’s post on this issue - with some making the point that auto-discovery in IE7 will solve the problem and others countering that if you want to add the feed to an online reader like Google Reader or Netvibes, then autodiscovery won’t resolve that problem.

We had a very fruitful discussion on that topic here a few weeks back, after Dave Winer suggested that we use a Subscribe button.

What we came up with was a combination of an orange Subscribe button and a Help button - thanks to FrankP’s generosity these buttons and the Help text are free to copy and use on other sites.

Robert - you obviously didn’t either 1) read the discussion or 2) read the discussion and forgot about it - I’m hurt ;-)

It is wintertime (officially)

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 30/10/2005
in Technology
. 0 Comments

In case you missed it, the clocks went back an hour overnight so it is an hour earlier than you thought!

Unfortunately, I was unsuccessful at explaining that to our 2 year old at 7a.m. (new time) this morning, so we were all up extra early :-(

PowerBook G4 wake-from-sleep keyboard failure

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 28/10/2005
in Mac
. 22 Comments

I’m having a really annoying problem with my Apple PowerBook G4 keyboard:
If the PowerBook hasn’t fully gone to sleep when the lid is closed, then the keyboard fails when the PowerBook wakes from sleep.

The effect of this is that without a functioning keyboard, I am unable to login to the PowerBook and so it has to be hard re-started.

On re-start, the keyboard functions fine again!

Anyone else come across something like this or, more importantly, know how to resolve it?

A lynch mob of 20 million?

Published
by
Tom Raftery
on 28/10/2005
in Blogging, Business blogging and Technology
. 9 Comments

Technorati recently announced that they are now tracking some 20 million bloggers and the number of bloggers is doubling every 5 months!

Now Forbes Magazine has a cover story titled “Attack of the Blogs” (registration required but thanks to Steve Rubel’s article I found that the bugmenot login/password “forbesdontbug” worked for me).

The article almost comes across as a spoof - indeed if it were not in Forbes magazine, I would have assumed it was a spoof, so outlandish are some of the claims in it. For instance it says:

Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo.

And it goes on to elaborate:

Google and other services operate with government-sanctioned impunity, protected from any liability for anything posted on the blogs they host. Thus they serve up vitriolic “content” without bearing any legal responsibility for ensuring it is fair or accurate; at times they even sell ads alongside the diatribes.

The article’s main thesis seems to hang off the case of one Gregory Halpern who was hounded by a blogger called Timothy Miles. Mr Miles wrote some allegedly defamatory posts about Mr Halpern under a pseudonym and has now fled legal proceedings against him to Slovenia. The salient point here is that the blog was seen as libellous and was taken down and the author had legal proceedings taken against him (from which he fled!).

Dan Gillmor says it best when he says:

Do bloggers sometimes go too far? Of course. But if the best-read bloggers typically did work of the lousy quality shown in the Forbes stories, they’d be pilloried — appropriately so.

As the article itself points out, Microsoft has 2,000 bloggers - does Forbes really believe that Microsoft is partaking in a lynch mob? And what about the other 20 million bloggers? Are we all part of this lynch mob “spewing lies, libel and invective.” to which Forbes refers?

I think Forbes owes bloggers an apology for this lazy reporting and these sweeping generalisations.

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