We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Return of the Bird…

The social media link buttons to Twitter and certain IM platforms have returned. I wonder why? 😀

That should fix the comments…

Looks like the technical glitch (caused by a rubbish WordPress update) that had borked the comments & removed much functionality has been fixed for now by adding moar Russian hamsters.

Technical issues

We are experiencing some technical issues with the commenting system… working on it!

Update 14th August 07:30 UTC: comments are now working. Service may be spotty while we investigate the underlying issue.

Site Renovation

We’re performing some long-needed maintenance on the site. If we did things right, you should not have noticed most of our work, but there will be a few user-visible changes.

First, you may have noticed that the site is much, much faster now than it was a few days ago. The (temporary) price of this has been the “Recent Comments” sidebar is now visible only on the front page. We will restore the sidebar when our new theme is complete.

Second, as implied above, we’re working on a new site theme. It should be much like the old on the surface. However, it will be much more maintainable, will feature better and more modern mobile support, and have (very) slightly updated aesthetics. It may also improve site performance even further, though things are quite snappy after our first round of changes.

Third, there has been a bit of site downtime in the last day, and will be a bit more in coming days as we complete our work. Downtime should never last more than ten to thirty minutes, so if the site is down, fret not, it will be back quickly.

Samizdata quote of the day

“When hedge-fund managers and the Communist Party see eye-to-eye on any question, it’s time to be concerned.”

Peter Oborne, writing in OpenDemocracy.

Welcome to the new Samizdata server

Enjoy! [edit: Tuesday December 6th, SSL is now enabled.]

hippocannon

Impending works – Monday afternoon/evening, London Time!

Samizdata is being moved to a newer, more lush, perhaps more louche server. This will also provide for freshening-up of the blog software, and a gradual migration to HTTPS.

Impact: Samizdata will be irregularly-offline this upcoming Monday, December 5th, starting from an estimated 3pm London time (10am Eastern, 1600h CET) for an estimated 4-to-6 hours, perhaps a little longer depending on how long the DNS bookkeeping takes.

If the migration fails we’ll fall back to the existing machine and continue, but it’s likely to be okay. Assuming that everything goes well, you may still expect a little flakiness when accessing the blog for up to 24 hours afterwards; after that time it’s a “bug”, or else we dropped something in transit.

“Fortune favours the bald!”, or something like that…

Why the Samizdata System Administrator voted ‘Remain’

Hi! I’m the guy who hosts, and looks after, Samizdata. I’m a software engineer.

Several years ago I did the port from old Samizdata for Perry, largely as a favour, but also because I believe strongly in free speech and that it should be heard. I’ve looked after it since that time.

So I’m basically a free speech activist rather than any stripe of “libertarian”.

And I don’t generally post, but Perry invited me to do so years ago, and I thought this was a worthwhile opportunity.

So why did I vote ‘Remain’?

→ Continue reading: Why the Samizdata System Administrator voted ‘Remain’