Category: Housekeeping

As of today, there is an index to this blog, which includes links to the previous edition of the blog.

Starting today, I’m moving this blog from a daily to a weekly publication schedule. The immediate cause of this move was Apple’s January 19th release of iBook Author, an iPad application designed to make it easy for educators to publish textbooks and supplementary materials. Apple’s announcement clarified something for me: blogs are just one aspect of the revolution in publishing that is currently happening.

I love blogging — and over the past few years I’ve experimented with video blogging, photo blogging, audio blogging (podcasts), microblogging (Twitter), and of course text blogging — but I’ve been spending an average of two hours a day on my various blogging projects. I want to experiment with other kinds of new publishing methods as well: interactive textbooks, e-books, print on demand, and more. In order to carve out the time to experiment with other publishing methods, I unfortunately have to cut back on the time I spend blogging.

So I’ll be changing my publication schedule here to a new post every Monday. If something comes up in the middle of the week — e.g., if I’m at a conference — I may post on other days as well. But there will always be something new every Monday.

There has been some down time on this blog the past two or three days, due to problems with my Web host’s MySQL database that resulted in error messages like “Error — unable to establish database connection.” All problems should be resolved by now.

I finally got around to restoring blog posts from 2005-2010 that disappeared in February of this year when the old blog crashed after being damaged by a malicious intruder. The old posts may be found at the old blog address — www.danielharper.org/blog.

There is no longer a redirect on the old address to this blog. Therefore, if you haven’t updated your bookmarks or your RSS reader, or if you’re following an old link, you’ll wind up at the old blog. So please update your bookmarks, etc.

Our Web hosting service has been having problems again, and our various Web sites have been down for short periods several times over the past couple of days. No final resolution of the problem yet, so if this blog happens to be down and you can’t read this post, don’t be surprised.

Sometime on 24 February 2011, my blog located at danielharper.org/blog melted down; cause remains unknown, but it may have been due to files that were damaged by a malicious hacker earlier in the week. Long story short: I had to create a whole new blog, which is what you’re now reading.

I placed a redirect on the old blog’s address, so your old bookmarks will still work. If you subscribed to the old blog via RSS feed, you may have to resubscribe. And if you ever linked to a post within this blog, that link will no longer work.

At some point, I will restore most of the old blog posts and comments somewhere on this Web site; but my first priority will be to get this new blog up and running.

On 21 February my blog was taken over by some malicious person who utilized a security hole in the old version of WordPress I was using. The problem was bad enough that Dennis from my Internet service provider had to shut down the blog, install the latest version of WordPress, and reinstall blog data. In the process, quite a few photos in past blog posts were lost; I will gradually reinstall those. Please let me know if you notice anything else that’s missing (e.g., a comment, etc.).

To other bloggers: If you’re using WordPress, save yourself some grief and install the latest version immediately!