Oops.

We're very sorry, but we've lost this webpage. All of it, every last blogpost and archive, all gone. We were updating our central database and it got corrupted and we lost everything. Sorry. We can only apologise.

It's quite a serious problem in fact. There was a major server glitch in the main status kernel and our backup files were overwritten with corrupted data. A rollback upgrade was underway at the time making the core files permanently irretrievable.

Regular users will know that there's been a lot of service capacity maintenance on the Blogger site recently. Individual application servers have trended toward 100% CPU usage over time, causing the online system interface to become slow and unresponsive. We were trying to make things better for you when we miscalculated and lost everything. We goofed.

We used to have 1¾million blogs but after today's minor accident we now only have 400,000. All blogs with a start date of 21 October 2004 or earlier have been lost. We can't overemphasize enough how much we regret the inconvenience to all of our dedicated long term users.

Our technical staff say this error occured because older blogs contained invalid code which was incompatible with Google AdSense body tags. We were hoping to introduce new AdSense bonus opportunities for all our core users next week, but now we'll be delaying our increased commercialization strategy until later in the month. Please be patient.

The good news for those of you who still have a blog is that our recent performance issues have finally cleared up. Now all those older blogs have been wiped from our servers they're not overutilizing system resources any more. You can now publish in seconds, rather than having to wait for minutes or even hours while nothing updates. There is a silver lining.

If you were the owner of this page then we're especially apologetic. We know that most of our bloggers only wrote one or two posts and then lost interest, but some of you had actually invested several hours of care and attention into producing something creative that was worth reading. But we know that you were in the minority, so never mind.

Maybe you'd like to start blogging again? We're sorry that your old name isn't available any more, but perhaps you could pick another name and start again from scratch. Think what fun it would be. All we ask is that you don't waste the first post on your new blog slagging us off. Yes, we know we messed up. We apologise.

We promise not to bugger up again. Long live Blogger.

posted by Jason at 12:00 am