It happened around 5 PM local time, yesterday, January 3rd. It was supposed to happen on the last day of November. One final bit of incompetence from the Powerblogs team: it took them over a month to shut down their server. But I used the time to capture more old posts the easy way. Yes, of course, I have backed up the entire site, comments and all. (Keith Burgess-Jackson kindly gave me unsolicited advice on how to do this.) I have also backed up the hundreds of partially completed draft posts. Trouble is, it is a royal pain in the culo to transfer the backed-up material to the archive site. I have done a little, as you can see here. But it is an awful chore working with a monstrously large blob of unstructured text, cutting it at the joints. It's work not fit for man nor beast. My life of creative leisure under the guiding star of otium liberale has spoiled me for mechanical and secretarial tasks. Being a vox clamantis in deserto doesn't help either.
I know of at least two bloggers who followed me to PowerBlogs. Sorry for the bum steer, guys. (I like the ambiguous resonance of that expression: I steered you in the wrong direction; I palmed off upon you a defective critter.) I followed the lead of Keith Burgess-Jackson who has run through more service providers than you can shake a stick at. Well, actually, only one more than me. Being a conservative, I take full responsibility for my actions, so no blame is to be laid at Keith's doorstep. But I do half-seriously surmise that it was Keith's peppering of Chris Landsown with questions that drove him AWOL.
There were two main problems with PowerBlogs. The first was that the server was not wholly reliable, though it was much better than Blogspot, which at the time I left was just awful. (But what do you want for a free service, and what can you expect? As a rule, you get what you pay for.) By contrast, the TypePad server is phenomenally good with uploads that are almost always instantaneous and with n0 outages, or at least none in my 14 months with them. And yet people stick with Google/Blogspot despite their shenanigans, which includes blacking out sites that stray from political correctness. It happened to Hodges and Mangan and undoubtedly gave them gray hairs. And yet they stay put. That's a head-scratcher. Perhaps they are worried about traffic loss. My traffic is going through the roof despite my moves. Your readers will find you. I don't know it for a fact, but it may be that there is something about TypePad that enhances traffic. It is now not unusual for me to get 1500+ page views in a day. Pretty good, I should think, given the austere content I serve up.
The second problem was that Chris Lansdown, who wrote the excellent and cutting-edge software, went AWOL early on. All development ceased, the graphics remained clunky, bugs were not ironed out, the Help pages were amateurishly written, the enterprise failed to gain momentum. The unseriousness was reflected in his failure to bill me. In the second year (2006) I had to remind him to bill me. In the following three years I said to hell with it and got the service for free, a service which, by the way, they still advertise! By contrast, TypePad is a thriving concern, with ongoing development. And they want my money, which I am happy to give them.
PowerBlogs had two features that TypePad lacks: a cutting-edge comment moderation utility and post-chaining. TypePad's ComBox set-up is inadequate. That's my only complaint. But at least with TypePad one can expect improvements. TypePad rules!
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