Site news: Getting back to normal

After crashing hard early last week, the main computer here at StLJN HQ is back up and running, and though there are a couple of software programs that stubbornly still refuse to reinstall, for the time being the major technical impediments to blogging seem to have been resolved.

Still, yr. humble editor has spent way too much time over the last few days staring at a computer screen. So, after posting some short items that came in over the last few days while I was otherwise occupied, I'll be taking a day off tomorrow. The weekly "Notes from the Net" post will be delayed until Tuesday, and, barring a breaking story of major importance or - perish the thought - further equipment malfunctions, regular posting will resume thereafter.

Site news: Possible downtime ahead

Posting here may may be light to non-existent for the next day or two, as the primary computer at StLJN HQ suffered a near-fatal crash last night, and it may take a while to reinstall all necessary software and get up and running at full speed again. (I do have a backup system, but am having some trouble with it getting online and logged in to my Yahoo mail and Blogger accounts.)

In a related development, if you've sent me an email in the last week to 10 days and have not yet received a response, please resend. I managed to clear most of my backlog of unanswered mail before the machine went belly-up, but some email records were lost in the crash, and I'm not sure if they can be recovered. If I owe you a reply, please re-send your original message, and I promise to get back to you as soon as possible.

Site news: StLJN held hostage by robots, and other tales from a lost weekend

By now, regular readers have probably noticed that there have been no new posts here for more than two days. This wasn't planned, but instead was a result of some problems with Blogger - specifically, late on Friday night, one of their software robots mistakenly identified this site as a "spam blog" and locked it up, leaving me unable to publish for more than 60 hours.

Mine wasn't the only site affected, as apparently the robots mistakenly locked hundreds, perhaps even thousands of legitimate sites in the pre-weekend sweep, as indicated by lots of messages posted on Blogger's online support forums by frustrated folks throughout the weekend.

Service was restored Monday afternoon after StLJN was reviewed and unlocked by an actual human being in Blogger support. So, barring further complications, regular posting should now resume unmolested, and the entries prepared over the weekend during the lockout have been posted with their original times and dates. (It would be silly to publish a "Saturday at the Movies" post on a Monday, yes?)

However, that wasn't the only thing that went wrong this weekend, as I was unable to attend and review the St. Louis Jazz and Heritage Festival as planned. After going through hoops for most of the morning and early afternoon trying to contact Blogger support, getting a massive headache from it, and then waiting as a rather substantial rainstorm shut down the Festival grounds for two hours, at midafternoon Saturday I got some bad news about the death of a friend. At that point, quite frankly, it had been a truly suckworthy day and I just didn't have it in me any more to go review a show with any sense of enjoyment.

And so, my apologies to the Festival producers, who were kind enough to provide press credentials, and to those of you, if any, who were looking forward to reading my take on the Festival. I've linked to Terry Perkins' review of the event in the next post, and have some thoughts that I'm shaping into a commentary for some time in the not-too-distant future, so the subject of the Festival will not go completely unexamined here.

In the meantime, it's just good to have the site not being held hostage any more. I do appreciate Blogger's efforts to reduce the number of "spam blogs" cluttering up the Internet, but here's hoping they can adjust their software robots so as to yield fewer false positives in the future.

(Disclaimer: Robot photo is for illustrative purposes only, and the presence of said robot photo should not be construed to mean that I was physically held hostage by this or any other robot.)

Site news: Almost, but not quite

An update on the switching-to-new-version-of-Blogger issue which, regular readers may recall, has been a proverbial thorn in yr. humble editor's side for a couple of weeks now:

The good news is that StLJN and sibling music video blog Heliocentric Worlds finally have been "migrated" successfully over to the new version of the software used to publish both sites. The bad news is that the new version is proving difficult to access; currently, I can only log on to Blogger by using an old version of Internet Explorer abandoned years ago, and even then attempts to update are being plagued by mysterious time-out problems, disappearing text and sundry other glitches.

All of which is basically a longwinded way of saying that posting may continue to be a bit spotty here until these technical issues are resolved, or a suitable workaround devised. Until then, your continued patience will be most appreciated.