Friday, May 13, 2011

Friday the 13th Unlucky For Blogger

Well, technically it started on Thursday the 12th, but as Blogger was down more than half of today and so far three of my posts haven't been restored I'm going to ascribe it to the old superstition anyway. Now, it so happens that as a software developer I'm incredibly paranoid about relying on cloud computing and back up my posts to text files so the articles can't be lost, but at this point I'm still not sure whether I'll need to repost them. They disappeared, then reappeared briefly, and are now gone again.

So is there any evidence that unlucky things happen on Friday the 13th, aside from the far too many sequels that have been made about a certain hockey-mask-wearing machete-wielding maniac? According to this Slate article at least one study has tentatively concluded yes, though as usual with anything paranormal the sample size is too small and there are a number of other variables that could be in play besides the date.

It turns out there is one reputable study that has tried to assess whether or not luck actually does go bad on Friday the 13th. (I'm not sure which is more surprising: that someone actually spent time researching this or that I could find only one such study. This is, after all, a world that has studied even how chewing gum distributes saliva around the mouth.) The 1993 study, published in the British Medical Journal, compared hospital admissions for traffic accidents on a Friday the 13th with those on a Friday the 6th in a community outside London. Despite a lower highway traffic volume on the 13th than on the 6th, admissions for traffic accident victims increased 52 percent on the 13th. "Friday the 13th is unlucky for some," the authors concluded. "Staying at home is recommended." How you escape the bad luck at home they didn't explain.

At any rate, remember when I said in my last site update that I wasn't moving Augoeides to Wordpress? This outage has me reconsidering, except that I would still have to move about 500 articles over and that's a serious pain. If anyone knows a good way to do it automatically feel free to let me know in comments, but otherwise I'm not going to just abandon everything I've posted here and start over even though I'm none too happy with Google's service at the moment.

UPDATE (3:50 PM): The Witchcraft Heights post showed up at 3:10 PM. As of 3:50 PM I've officially given up and reposted the last two missing articles. Since neither had any comments I figured there was no point in waiting any longer.

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9 comments:

bX-59cppw said...

It's pretty simple doing so actually:
http://ourtimes.wordpress.com/2008/05/08/import-blogger-into-wordpress/

Templates / custom styles and such have to be re-edited from scratch though...

The Paper Mulberry - Glenda Steel said...

Could I possibly ask, how do you save a post as a text file? It seems such a clever and sensible thing to do but is quite beyond my computing skills and as a novice blogger I have no idea where I would start! I do hope you don't mind my asking, only I take rather a lot of time and effort compiling each post and would hate to see it disappear as it did today! In fact my lasted post, posted yesterday is still not back!!! Warmest wishes - Glenda

The Paper Mulberry - Glenda Steel said...

Oh my goodness that's spooky, was that message from bx-59cppw there before??!!! I swear I was the 1st message, it really is 13th!!!

Brian D. Switzer said...

My method of backing up articles is simple. I subscribe to my own RSS feed. My e-mail reader automatically downloads every post for me. Nothing to it.

Scott Stenwick said...

Thanks for the info on moving to Wordpress. I'll have to look through the themes and templates that are available and see if I can find one I like. One of my other problems is that some of my articles have pretty high page ranks at this point and I've got mixed feelings about changing those URL's.

Saving articles as text files is super easy. Just before you publish a post, go to the "Edit HTML" tab (if you're not already there), select all, copy, open Notepad, and paste. Then save it with a descriptive filename. I have a "posts" directory on my PC where I keep them all.

Deanna Bonds said...

Google has left a response about the outage at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/blogger-is-back.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FMKuf+%28Official+Google+Blog%29

I don't think you will loose posts or comments.

Scott Stenwick said...

I'm hoping not. My missing posts didn't have any comments and were fairly short, but I'm looking around and still seeing a number of blogs that lost more substantive stuff.

We'll see if it gets done by the end of the day, though. Because that could take some luck.

M.C. said...

Lifehacker has posted a video detailing the transition and it says you can move over all your data, google ranking and subscribers. I havent checked it out yet but Lifehacker generally know what they're talkign about and I'm thinking of bringing my own blog over

http://lifehacker.com/5357742/move-from-blogger-to-wordpress-without-losing-google-rank

Scott Stenwick said...

Cool - I'll check that out. Thanks for the info.