A few people were surprised last week when the part of my blog at discuss.jarretthousenorth.com went offline. Well, me too! I had a lot of concert commitments at the end of last week and didn't notice over the weekend when the site went down, nor when my site was replaced with a default Weblogger.com page. But obviously it’s back now.

So here’s what happened: the Manila server that powers my dynamic site (the part where I actually create the content and that serves my RSS feed) suffered a hardware failure. Fortunately, my blog host, the redoubtable Mr. Erin Clerico at Weblogger, had a full backup; it took the better part of the day to bring the backup online on a secondary Manila server, and then my blog took a little longer because of its size (hey, seven years of blog content isn’t a trivial amount of data).

The good news is that after this event, Erin is even more motivated than before to move his Manila sites to a platform that’s more stable and that is being actively maintained. So he’s officially announced his migration service for taking Manila to Wordpress. At the end of the process I’ll have all my blog content (except, unfortunately, the old comments; but those haven’t been accessible for two years now anyway) in a new, modern container that includes far more support for management and spam elimination. Sounds like a win-win to me.

Or, as I told Greg yesterday: I for one welcome our new open-source blogging solution overlords!