Blogging Tips

JournalSpace, a 6 year old blogging platform similar to Blogger, WordPress.com etc, is no more, after a disgruntled IT employee overwrote the company hard drive. It is currently unclear how many bloggers are affected by this.

The JournalSpace.com and JournalSpace.net domain is currently on sale on ebay though the backend code will not be included because ‘it needs too much work at this point to make it a truly turnkey system that anybody can easily set up‘ (current high bid is US $2,600). They do plan on releasing the backend code in the future to the open source community once they have tidied up the code.

According to the blog they set up :

Some more background for the folks who caught the news on Slashdot or another blog: yes, I was a huge idiot, first and foremost.

It was the guy handling the IT (and, yes, the same guy who I caught stealing from the company, and who did a slash-and-burn on some servers on his way out) who made the choice to rely on RAID as the only backup mechanism for the SQL server. He had set up automated backups for the HTTP server which contains the PHP code, but, inscrutibly, had no backup system in place for the SQL data. The ironic thing here is that one of his hobbies was telling everybody how smart he was.

This doesn’t excuse what happened, though: I should have taken a better look at what he’d left behind, and fixed all of the things that needed fixing.

This is why backups are so important and why I believe bloggers should take control of their own blog. Free blogging services such as Blogger and WordPress.com are good and I belive that they are unlikely to suffer the same fate as JournalSpace but nevertheless, your blog is still hosted by someone else so you don’t have 100% control over the blog.

Link : Not with a bang but a whimper