As a followup to this post from yesterday about the sudden announcement that all weblogs.com-hosted sites would no longer be kept on those servers, I wanted to post some comments from one of the "homeless" bloggers I mentioned, Rex Hammock. He was nice enough to send me a note this afternoon, and we've since traded a few messages on the subject.

Rex was the proprietor of rex.weblogs.com, soon to be reborn as rexblog.com sometime tomorrow, if all goes as planned. If you don't read Hammock's site, then you probably hadn't noticed that he was away for a few days - this is what led to my speculation that "dormant" sites had been dropped from the weblogs.com servers because they were not up to date. Since that doesn't seem to be the case, the questions why some blogs hosted there are still up are left unanswered at this point, and I'm doing my best to get some answers.

Hammock learned of the hosting change last night from a contact of his, Steve Kirks (who maintains houseofwarwick.com), but unfortunately wasn't able to do much at that time because he was out of town. In fact, Hammock returned from one trip today just in time to leave for another, which of course complicates the situation even further. On learning of the change, Hammock says:

I must say this is a strange occurance in the nascient life of the blogosphere: to have ones home taken away without any prior warning. Bizarre, really, as it was perpetrated by one of the creators of the blogosophere.

...

Let me say that I have always felt very fortunate to have a weblog host who has never charged me, nor served up an ad. Who never asked anything of me. And who provided me with a platform I knew how to operate (for the most part). I didn't know why I was the recipient of such a gift until Doc Searls told me a year ago that those of us with weblogs.com URLs had been "grand-fathered in" by the weblogs.com folks, the "folks" being Dave Winer (yet I assumed it was Userland).

...

I guess it should not have surprised me that all good things do come to an end.
But I didn't expect it to end in such an abrupt fashion. Without notice.
Without the ability to re-direct. Without a heads-up to back-up.

This seems to be the similar statement that most of the people in Hammock's situation have made. They are more than grateful to have a host whose servers fully supported the use of Radio Manila (thanks, Steve!) as an CMS, who never charged them a dime for hosting. Unfortunately, just as Winer and company are in the pinch when it comes to hosting costs and rackspace, the creators of all kinds of great content are left...without their great content - at least until July 1st.

This teaches us all a valuable lesson, frankly. That we better start backing up our sites manually. I've already had one site I worked on for over a year get hacked into, with all my Movable Type usernames erased from the system. Lots of work on templates, posts, etc. all gone. I'll tell you what - after I found out I wasn't able to recreate what I needed to in order to get started where I left off, it left a bad taste in my mouth. I just hope that three weeks worth of non-blogging missing their old posts doesn't turn off all the bloggers whose posts are missing in action. What I will say, however, is that one should expect that Blogger is in for one heck of an influx of users.

[update] Jeneane Sessum over at allied posted a transcript of Dave Winer's audio post from today. It includes some details on what happened with the weblogs.com sites, why it happened the way it did, and what's up with the July 1st date. I agree that there are very extenuating circumstances, but I don't think this was handled properly, and it's my opinion to think so. Jeneane follows that up here, where she says "WHY the big boys of weblogging refuse to stand up to him and call his actions out for what they are, I don't know." I'll tell you right now that my traffic is about double what it's been of late, much of which is about this particular topic. I've searched all over the place today wondering why there hasn't been a huge outcry over this. Am I blowing this out of proportion? I don't think so. While blogspot.com has a lot more users than weblogs.com did, if it were to go down randomly, we'd be ripping Google a new one faster than you can say "evhead" - why is the same not holding true here? I certainly hope that people aren't holding back criticism for the sake of Dave Winer. I met Dave earlier this year at BloggerCon, and he does some excellent work on a ton of projects, sites, and efforts across the world of blogs - but I disagree with this move as a business decision - whether it's just Dave or 50 people, it's still a business decision. And a poor one at that.