So Blogger had a hiccough, and I've seen people in blogs I read being confused about why their posts and comments to posts seemed to vanish. I wish that people had more autonomy over their data and didn't just feel it could vanish like that when someone messes up. Giving nontechnical people that autonomy is hard, things have to be made quite simple, and they have to be educated to want it.

Liw and I are trying to take preservation of user data beyond backups at Branchable. Coincidentially[1], while Blogger was down I was working on automating_git_pushes_from_Branchable. So every change made to a site is committed to git and pushed right offsite to GitHub or Gitorious, or a personal server.

The only hard part of this for the user is the ssh key distribution, which is currently a cut and paste affair. Monkeysphere, I've got my eye on you..

By the way, I was stunned to see that GitHub does not support automatic git pushes out of GitHub. Although it can notify a million CIA-type services, the actual data is thus very subtly encouraged to be siloed. This feature seems to have been requested since at least 2009. Can't be that hard can it? (I didn't see a way to make Gitorious do it either.)

[1] Actually, this was the last feature I needed to move Ikiwiki's own wiki over to Branchable, so I plan to do that soon and retire its current server.