CT Biz Blogs

One of the most popular blogging applications, TypePad, from Six Apart, has been having problems since sometime Thursday night. It’s just about over, now. This affected some of my favorite blogs, such as Seth’s Blog, Micro Persuasion, and Signs Never Sleep.

At first, the blogs weren’t available at all — people were seeing a “down for maintenance” page instead. Then they were up, but with posts only up to December 10th. I found this out as I was reading posts in my feed reader. I wanted to look at comments, so I clicked on the title of the post, which should have brought me to the actual blog post. Instead I got a “page not found” message.

I didn’t think to go to TypePad’s blog, but instead sent an email to Steve Rubel, owner of Micro Persuasion. He sent back a quick note. Thanks, Steve, for taking time out to email me.

There are varied reactions in the blogosphere over this outage. Some people are very angry, especially since TypePad had problems a few months back, when pages were loading too slowly and people had a lot of trouble getting into their blogs. Others, such as Steve, are very understanding and supportive of TypePad. He’s taking the long view and has an interesting analogy to eBay. However, the difference between eBay and TypePad, is that eBay, I believe, doesn’t charge to place the ad. They get their cut when the sale is made. For TypePad, you pay about $100/year (which isn’t a lot).

I think it’s a good reality check to realize that problems like this will crop up, no matter what service you use. Blogger, WordPress, all of the popular applications have had technical issues of one sort or another in the past year.

Some people are saying that this shows why it’s important to host your own blog, rather than rely on a hosted blog. But even that won’t help if, as happened in August here, your web hosting service is hit with a massive power outage and backups fail.

In my case, it was only a matter of hours before CTBizBlogs was back online, and nothing was lost. It remains to be seen if anything was lost with TypePad’s outage — they are restoring blogs from backups now.

So what’s the solution, to have your own internet server and watch it like a hawk, 24/7? Not gonna happen, especially for small businesses.

So is the solution not to get into blogging at all, because the technology is so uncertain? Sure, that’s the ticket. And also don’t have phone service, or electricity, either. Those go out at the most inconvenient times (like right when I want to blog or before an episode of Lost).

Maybe instead of obsessing about what we lose when these things happen to our blogs, we need to think of what we’ve gained because of the blogging and networking that we’ve done.

I don’t use TypePad, but I think it’s a great application. I was going to experiment with it this weekend, but I think I’ll wait until the excitement has died down.