Comments on: WinerLog has moved.

WinerLog has moved.

rcade — Tue, 29 Jan 2002 13:47:14 -0800

WinerLog is no longer being hosted on EditThisPage. Film at 11.

By: Neale

Neale — Tue, 29 Jan 2002 14:09:26 -0800

Least surprising news ever.

By: machaus

machaus — Tue, 29 Jan 2002 14:18:44 -0800

hmm, I thought he had a good sense of humor most of the time...

By: anildash

anildash — Tue, 29 Jan 2002 14:32:21 -0800

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.

By: rodii

rodii — Tue, 29 Jan 2002 14:33:02 -0800

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.

By: Su

Su — Tue, 29 Jan 2002 15:30:07 -0800

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?

By: rcade

rcade — Tue, 29 Jan 2002 16:39:47 -0800

Not me.

By: mrmorgan

mrmorgan — Tue, 29 Jan 2002 16:39:53 -0800

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!

By: jpoulos

jpoulos — Tue, 29 Jan 2002 20:16:49 -0800

This is one weblog soap opera I haven't followed very closely. Anyone care to give a quick backstory?

By: rcade

rcade — Tue, 29 Jan 2002 21:06:30 -0800

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.

By: davewiner

davewiner — Tue, 29 Jan 2002 21:45:29 -0800

We didn't shut it down.

By: insomnia_lj

insomnia_lj — Wed, 30 Jan 2002 10:17:39 -0800

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?

By: davewiner

davewiner — Wed, 30 Jan 2002 13:39:51 -0800

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.

By: daveadams

daveadams — Wed, 30 Jan 2002 14:20:08 -0800

We almost went broke at the end of last year.

*cries*

By: davewiner

davewiner — Wed, 30 Jan 2002 15:23:22 -0800

*cries*

F.U.

By: anitar

anitar — Wed, 30 Jan 2002 16:11:11 -0800

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.

By: rcade

rcade — Wed, 30 Jan 2002 21:24:59 -0800

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.

By: rcade

rcade — Wed, 30 Jan 2002 21:25:59 -0800

I spoke too soon -- WinerLog apparently did get its data backed up before the ETP site went boom.

By: rcade

rcade — Wed, 30 Jan 2002 21:30:31 -0800

Never mind.

By: davewiner

davewiner — Thu, 31 Jan 2002 12:24:02 -0800

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.

By: rcade

rcade — Thu, 31 Jan 2002 12:38:37 -0800

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.

By: davewiner

davewiner — Fri, 01 Feb 2002 06:36:18 -0800

"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.

By: harmful

harmful — Fri, 01 Feb 2002 18:02:45 -0800

*cough*