We interrupt this post-holiday blogging slowdown for an important blog housekeeping message. Something weird happened to Respectful Insolence⢠over the weekend before Christmas.
Sunday, I was composing a little missive to autopost over the holidays. I went to the pulldown menu in Movable Type to assign a category to it and noticed something odd. There were many more categories than I had, many of which had nothing to do with my usual topics and most of them uncapitalized. My user-defined categories for posts were there, but a whole bunch of unfamiliar categories had appeared. Puzzled, I cruised over to the Archives page and, to my dismay, the new categories were there as well.
It took me a little while to figure out what appeared to be going on. If you don’t dig into the archives, everything appears normal, but somehow my blog has now become a weird fusion of Respectful Insolence and Zooillogix, at least as far as the archives and categories go. Indeed, if you click on some of the obviously non-Insolent categories, you’ll find Zooillogix posts mixed in with my usual stuff. For example, here’s a perfectly fine post about Army ants that appears to be on this blog but is in reality merely a copy of the original. None of these Zooillogix posts show up on the back end, where I compose my posts, meaning that I can’t go through and delete them. There are probably hundreds of them, anyway, which would make going through and manually deleting them a bit more effort than I would have wanted.
Unfortunately, virtually everyone at the mothership is away for the holidays. Our chief techie is aware of the problem, but I have no idea whether he’ll manage to figure out what’s going on and fix the problem during the holiday break. I wouldn’t be surprised if this problem didn’t get fixed until after January 1. In the meantime, my archives appear to have a copy of Zooillogix fused to them. I can only speculate that the database has gotten screwed up somehow; my knowledge of Movable Type is to limited to come up with any other possibilities.
I hope this problem is fixed soon. Zooillogix is a perfectly fine blog with great posts about animals, but it just isn’t Orac and it isn’t Insolent, Respectfully or otherwise. In the meantime, I’ll just keep doing what I usually do on this blog, although even Orac needs a recharge occasionally. That means that maybe there’ll be some reposts of Classic Insolence from the old blog (or maybe not if I can’t tear myself away from blogging even for the holidays).
You’ll just have to keep coming back to find out (and to keep my traffic from plummeting as far as it usually does between Christmas and New Years).
