WinerLog has moved. January 29, 2002 1:47 PM   Subscribe

WinerLog is no longer being hosted on EditThisPage. Film at 11.
posted by rcade to General Weblog-Related at 1:47 PM (22 comments total)

Least surprising news ever.
posted by Neale at 2:09 PM on January 29, 2002


hmm, I thought he had a good sense of humor most of the time...
posted by machaus at 2:18 PM on January 29, 2002


Winerlog is almost as lame as its subject, mostly. Bad parody makes it so much harder to defend people's right to parodize. I don't blame him, honestly.
posted by anildash at 2:32 PM on January 29, 2002


I imagine it's hard to take legal action someone if you're also hosting them. This would be the first step I would take, were I contemplating lawyery things.

Winerlog is almost as lame as its subject, mostly.

It was good once.
posted by rodii at 2:33 PM on January 29, 2002


I'm waiting for the part of this post that tells me why I care.
I'll probably be switching hosts in June. Who wants the scoop?
posted by Su at 3:30 PM on January 29, 2002


Not me.
posted by rcade at 4:39 PM on January 29, 2002


The old Winerlog looks to be up, still sporting its custom-delay feature. Still mostly not funny. And still with a logo that could not only get me fired at work, but probably arrested as well. Ugh!
posted by mrmorgan at 4:39 PM on January 29, 2002


This is one weblog soap opera I haven't followed very closely. Anyone care to give a quick backstory?
posted by jpoulos at 8:16 PM on January 29, 2002


Bad parody makes it so much harder to defend people's right to parodize.

WinerLog hasn't been a parody for a while. It's a bitter screed. I think it still serves a purpose, but I'm glad it's moving off Dave's servers so that particular issue can finally die.

For those who don't know the story, WinerLog began as a hilarious Scripting News parody by Greg Knauss that was almost affectionate in its portrayal of Dave Winer. My favorite thing about it was Dave WinerLog's insane preoccupation with bees. "Bees in my hair! Aieeee!"

After about three weeks, Knauss recognized that to continue the parody beyond that point was an unhealthy lifestyle choice. He handed WinerLog off to someone else -- Dave believes John Grohol -- and it became a mix of parody items and more harsh material aimed at getting Dave's goat.

There have been several WinerLog threads here that explain some of the battles between the publisher and Dave Winer. Mentioning them in more specificity is likely to attract a swarm of people attacking and/or defending him.
posted by rcade at 9:06 PM on January 29, 2002


We didn't shut it down.
posted by davewiner at 9:45 PM on January 29, 2002


I thought the implication was that somehow the site was slowed down drastically, and not shut down.

The question is whether steps have been taken against Winerlog that target them specifically, as opposed to other weblogs. Saying that the site wasn't shut them down doesn't answer that question, and it does nothing to calm those who might be concerned that this is a form of censorship.

The specific allegations I've heard are:

1> That there were changes made to weblogs.com that were designed to lower the ranking of Winerlog.

2> That someone at Winerlog tried to set up a RadioUserland 8 site, only to have their service cut off.

3> That there is something going on that is/was slowing down http://winerlog.editthispage.com specifically.

The problem is, nobody really knows whether any of this is true, or whether there is some kind of reasonable explanation for all of it.

It does seem that http://winerlog.editthispage.com is loading awfully slow right now, though. Has anyone noticed similar slowdowns on other Edit This Page sites?
posted by insomnia_lj at 10:17 AM on January 30, 2002


It was a total crock, like everything else on that site. The server he was (and still is) on has a couple of sites with huge traffic and one has a huge discussion group. That the machine is slow has nothing to do with him, it's just another thing to raise a stink about. There are lots of other sites on that machine. I don't hear them making accusations. The fact is we run a free service, and that model doesn't work very well. We almost went broke at the end of last year. It takes a lot of gall to give us shit over a free service, when the guy doesn't even say who he is, and says all those nasty things about me (and what's up with that picture, geez). What a sad twisted place. Have a great day.
posted by davewiner at 1:39 PM on January 30, 2002


We almost went broke at the end of last year.

*cries*
posted by daveadams at 2:20 PM on January 30, 2002


*cries*

F.U.
posted by davewiner at 3:23 PM on January 30, 2002


What I wonder about is why I don't see update-pings from winerlog on weblogs.com (or via blogtracker)? Most recent is from January 14 2002 in the 9 am hour.
posted by anitar at 4:11 PM on January 30, 2002


Dave: What new boundary did WinerLog allegedly cross that was so bad you deleted their old site before they had any time to export all the data? If it relates to VersionTracker, there's nothing on its Radio Userland page that's negative about the software.
posted by rcade at 9:24 PM on January 30, 2002


I spoke too soon -- WinerLog apparently did get its data backed up before the ETP site went boom.
posted by rcade at 9:25 PM on January 30, 2002


Never mind.
posted by rcade at 9:30 PM on January 30, 2002


Anita, winerlog pushes the boundaries everywhere, on weblogs.com too. We block ping-spammers, people who ping the server with changes to try to stay at the top of the list. We do it quickly as soon as we see it happening. We're not going to publish the list, that gives a bennie to the ps'ers and would encourage more people to do it.

To Rogers, I've been posting admonitions to people to back up their UserLand-hosted Manila sites since mid-late 2000, well over a year.
posted by davewiner at 12:24 PM on January 31, 2002


That's great. If I was quitting EditThisPage for another site, though, I would hope for a week or two before the deletion of my site so I could make sure all the data was saved.

However, no harm, no foul here. The Zaphodim claim to have backed everything up.
posted by rcade at 12:38 PM on January 31, 2002


"I would hope for a week or two before the deletion of my site so I could make sure all the data was saved."

Absolutely. And you would get it. And if you were expecting help, you wouldn't respond by trying to kill the sales of the product that was paying for the service you were getting for free.
posted by davewiner at 6:36 AM on February 1, 2002


*cough*
posted by harmful at 6:02 PM on February 1, 2002


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