Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Something needs to be done about our bogus SCOTUS.

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Not all heroes wear capes.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

Usually wrong but never in doubt

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

Come on, media. you have one job. start doing it.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!

Damn right I heard that as a threat.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

After roe, women are no longer free.

Republicans are radicals, not conservatives.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

You are here: Home / Site Maintenance / Here’s Where Things Stand With the Site

Here’s Where Things Stand With the Site

by | 60 Comments

This post is in: 

The triple merge has happened.

There are a lot of things to be fixed.  Cursory check shows we have no media images before 2008.  We have 575 posts that don’t have the author.  All the draft posts show as published in 1970.  Etc.  I’m sure I will find many more things that aren’t quite right.

So here’s what we’re gonna do.

We are going to use the site as usual tonight and give the site developers / site hosts 2 options.

We can lose everything we do tonight (posts, comments, images etc) and go back to new-old Balloon Juice tomorrow, and we go through this whole process again at a later date, with the bugs worked out.

OR

We start using this as the mother ship, with everything imperfectly merged, and they agree to continue to do the cleanup so that we have everything back.  To be completed within one month maximum.  This will mean occasional downtime while they import media library etc.

So for now, this is Balloon Juice.  We’ll know more tomorrow!

Update: all in all, merging the 3 sites was a massively complex job, and kudos for them for what they have accomplished.

Reader Interactions

60Comments

  2. 2.

    H.E.Wolf

    Grateful thanks are in order, either way!​
     

    ETA: *AND* y’all got things up and running in time for the Jan 6 Committee hearings – now that is true excellence! :-)

  3. 3.

    bk

    A few minutes ago I was asked to log in, and I was told that neither my user name nor my email was recognized. Both of which show up below.

  6. 6.

    Grumpy Old Railroader

    Every solution creates new problems. I’m fine with whichever choice is made. If the new site has lost some hair and is now a little balder, that’s okay, it happens to all of us.

  9. 9.

    bbleh

    Definitely need some sort of death-rebirth ceremony.  Probably should involve, just off the top of my head, fire, mead, nudity, dogs and cats, maybe moonshine, and some kind of ceremonial sacrifice of electronic hardware.

  10. 10.

    Mike in NC

    Looks like we need to have a User ID and Password to read this site now. How do I get them???

  12. 12.

    Fair Economist

    Thanks again.

    Since this is likely to be a very hot commenting day, my inclination is “keep today, fix what’s possible, and give up on the rest.” 575 lost authorships, for example, is chump change – how many million posts do we have?

  14. 14.

    mrmoshpotato

    Most likely a Firefox thing that’s out of our hands, but…

    Firefox Can’t Open This Page (window under Balloon Juice for Ukraine)

    To protect your security, secure.actblue.com will not allow Firefox to display the page if another site has embedded it. To see this page, you need to open it in a new window.

    Using Firefox 102.0.1 on Windows 7 (32-bit)

  15. 15.

    CaseyL

    You (and whoever else is on the team) did GREAT.

    Please ignore my email about the login.

  17. 17.

    Tony Jay

    @WaterGirl:

    Just disregard those E-mails I sent you demanding my money back, I stumbled upon the one easy trick to get back here and all is well.

  20. 20.

    JaneE

    Considering the task, you did great.  Let’s hope that we can fix going forward and not back up and start over later.

  21. 21.

    Spanky

    WG, you can ignore my email about the login page.

    And a hearty THANKS to you and everyone who worked on it

    ETA (because why not test the edit) my email to wg went out just a few minutes before everything turned on.

  23. 23.

    MagdaInBlack

    Well, this is a relief, cause I had no effin clue what my non-existent password was.

  24. 24.

    JaySinWA

    There are a lot of posts both old and newish that are attributed to team @ bizbudding.com

    This last Silverman post on Ukraine for example https://balloon-juice.com/2022/07/21/war-for-ukraine-day-147-first-lady-zelenska-speaks-to-members-of-congress-ukraine-continues-to-counter-strike-in-kherson/

    ETA I first noticed by going back to ancient posts to see how they looked. Many of those are dated to  Jan 1,1970. Are those the draft posts? I wouldn’t think I would see drafts

    ETA 2 For example got to the top of the page and click on open threads, click on the last numbered page. All dated Jan 1 and use the team email as the poster. Looking at dates in the tweets they only go back to July 202

    ETA 3 Not a complaint, just noting that things look wonkier than I think you described.

  25. 25.

    Albatrossity

    Kudos to all, and mostly to WG for keeping this ship afloat!

    I can report that the links to posts on BJ from my picture portfolio site (available by clicking on my nym here) are now functional again. Progress!

    And now we’re off to watch the show!

  28. 28.

    WaterGirl

    @Mike in NC:

    While i was testing the merged server, we made it so that only front-pagers (who have WordPress logins) could get in.

    Once I determined where things stood then I opened it up to everyone without a login and password.

  30. 30.

    different-church-lady

    No big deal, but I notice recent comments is missing from the sidebar.

  32. 32.

    HumboldtBlue

    Any opinions I have on the technicals of this site are less useful than those of my cat, so whatever the big brains decide is just fine.

  34. 34.

    WaterGirl

    @JaySinWA: No, that’s exactly what I described. :-)

    I had maybe 30 minutes to check things out and make a decision about what to do about it.  I will still do the methodical check I had intended, but it will be tomorrow and not today.

    I thought the most important thing was to get people back on BJ.

  36. 36.

    JaySinWA

    @WaterGirl: I got that, I just expected them to be from the older posts. So as you said you  merged the new stuff into the old BJ and the newly merged stuff is having issues.

  37. 37.

    Anonymous At Work

    Seriously, how hard could it have been to lead off with “IT’S ALIVE! IT’S ALIVE!!!”?

  39. 39.

    scav

    Congrats, Yea, & Thanks, in any and all order(s) and with sufficient exclamation marks.

  41. 41.

    WaterGirl

    I am just answering all the email messages with a copy & paste explanation.  Not meaning to be unfriendly, there were just a ton of messages and I am just trying to get the word out.

  42. 42.

    different-church-lady

    We can lose everything we do tonight (posts, comments, images etc) and go back to new-old Balloon Juice tomorrow, and we go through this whole process again at a later date, with the bugs worked out.

    Then you’d have four sites to merge.

  43. 43.

    different-church-lady

    @WaterGirl: ​
     Good coding is hard to find
    Good coding is hard to find
    Cole got lucky, babe…
    Cole got lucky, babe
    When he found you.

  46. 46.

    EmanG

    Just my 2 cents, but I’m basically ride or die with BJ at this point. My relationship with the site for over 15 years is, as with all things internet, constant and transitory. I don’t speak up much but I’m here, multiple times a day, damn near every day and I am so thankful for the blood, sweat and tears y’all have expended working to bring it back. It’s perfect in it’s imperfection and knowing that BJ continues, bloodied but unbowed, brings me infinite joy.

  47. 47.

    eachother

    Best of luck and skill restoring the BJ mission.
    Strictly in a sci-fi way, the Mother Ship blinking out is concerning.

    (This post will self destruct by morning.)
    So I will say knowing it will disappear like Secret Service phone communications, I love this place. And appreciate you all.

    May the time machine be with us.
    And this message, should it survive, be felt like I feel writing it.

  48. 48.

    The Pale Scot

    Awesome, I assume that all these user bells and whistles required a lot of brainwork.

  49. 49.

    Bill Arnold

    Very nice, thank you all.
    A few probes suggest that google has discarded its index for the previous site. (Tried one bing lookup too, same.)
    Google has a simple way (I don’t recall the details and have not tried it) to request the indexing of a site.
    (Some tech details of how the site was recovered would be appreciated if appropriate.)

  50. 50.

    Ruckus

    Is this old home week?

    Smells like new upholstery in here…..

    New looks like old. Not too shabby….

    Thanks WG and all the rest that put in all the effort.

  56. 56.

    WaterGirl

    @Timill: I think if you give it time, Feedly will figure it out.  When we moved to new-old balloon juice it took a few hours, maybe a day, and then picked right up again.

  59. 59.

    sab

    My pet pic of my late, lamented German Shepherd is back in the archives from July, 2009. Yay!

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