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]

Then again…

Our migration to the new CMS will not happen until next weekend, so you can enjoy your fix of spleenic rants and pro-liberty disgruntlements throughout the weekend uninterrupted.

We felt it was better to get it right than do it fast… plus I am told the stars will be more favourably aligned next weekend.

A possible interruption to the rant-flow at Samizdata.net

This weekend, if all goes well, the bloated monstrosity that is Samizdata’s back-end, all 11,000+ articles and 182,000+ comments (hopefully) will get dumped into a new CMS.

I fully expect all manner of server burps, devoured articles and comments and sundry debugging issues will crop up but we will try to keep the disruption to our crazed rants and your edification to a minimum. Wish us luck.

Samizdata just had a near death experience

As you might have noticed, the Samizdata server crapped out in a major way… and just to make it menthol, we also lost all our back-ups after 24th September (quite how that happened is still a bit unclear).

Well at least I had a separate set of back-ups also made by someone else, so no problem, thinks I… so imagine my happiness when I discover that the back-up back-up server crapped out some time ago and we were not in fact being backed up. That would have been nice to know.

I will be manually reconstructing the posts as best I can from the full RSS feeds.

Oh joy.

Needless to say I shall be setting up some sort of full site backup myself now.

As requested… a Samizdata facebook group

As I have had several people ask, I have set up a Samizdata Facebook group.

Now all I have to do if figure out what to do with it as I am new to Facebook.

Full XML feed

As requested, Samizdata.net now provides a full text XML feed for those who want it.

Immediate assistance needed

The newly minted high-school graduate daughter of a co-worker is on walkabout in Europe and due to a train strike in Italy is about to end up at Gatwick in the wee hours. Her father is trying to find some place for her to stay.

Any suggestions on places she could find a room at perhaps 3am in London are welcome. Any of our Samizdata staff awake over there still?

Server woes

Apologies for the sluggishness of the site recently, we have been under concerted attack from spammers.

A pox on all spammers

We are having availability problems due to a major spammer attack… please bear with us.

Internet problems in East Asia

Readers in some areas of East Asia may experience difficulty in reaching us due to at least 6 submarine fibre cuts around Taiwan caused by the earthquake there.

It is my understanding the remaining capacity is ‘jammed up’ and it may be a week before there is any improvement.

Possible interruption of anti-statist tirades

Samizdata may be intermittently unavailable today as we are scheduled for a server upgrade… nothing serious hopefully.

Comment system playing up again

Some odd things have happened with a few recent comments (some garbling and different people’s comment running into each other). Most comments seem to be posting okay however. We are looking into the problem.

Comment system seems to be playing up

Sorry, but the comment system is acting weird… we will try to get it fixed as soon as possible.

It seems to be blocking things it should not and has posted most of the comments entered today dated… some time tomorrow!