Changing Directions
After Friday’s little foray into the power of profiling with computer algorithms that resulted in a whole lot of annoyed people and little progress in the War On Terror Spam I think more people now understand why I don’t hold out much hope for getting anything worthwhile from all of the data the Hedgemony is hoovering up, and a need to set up back-up blogging locations for all of the hardcore addicts who went cold turkey for approximately 24 hours having been reduced in rank from bloggers to commenters.
One of the things that occurred, it that while no new posts could be written, people had access to their templates. This allowed people like skippy, Elayne, Roy, et al. to tell people what had happened. That was enough for most people, but the hardcore bloggers needed to let the words out.
If you are hardcore you should have a back-up blog. I set up Whynowannex.wordpress.com when everything went South for my host due to an unannounced power shut down during the middle of the Iditarod.
If I were in the same situation as yesterday with access to the template I would have re-directed people to my new location. These chunks of code are not the best way of doing this, but you can’t access the preferred methods, which involve having your server do it with HTTP 30X codes. Both of these methods are put in the HEAD section of the template, i.e. between the <head> and </head> tags:
Version 1
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Refresh" CONTENT="5; URL=http://www.backupblog.com">
Version 2
<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">
<!--
location.replace("http://www.backupblog.com");
// -->
</script>
Version 1 is short and easy and gives people 5 seconds to figure that they are being redirected, but it is depreciated, it does bad things to the Back button behavior, and it is used a lot by spammers. If you slap it into your HEAD section, you are checking a box on the “spam characteristics checklist”.
Version 2 requires that people have JavaScript enabled in their browser, but most people do, and it enables the Back button on the browser to work properly as it actually replaces the original address in the browser’s history file.
If you can’t go without blogging and you can’t access the server to do it right [you can’t on any free blogging site] try Version 2. Just replace the www.backupblog.com with the location of your back-up blog.
