Currently we are testing the new version 2.6.x of our WordPress MU blog system. If the tests are successful, we plan to upgrade on December 18.

In this case, the weblog service would be offline the whole day. We will publish the definitive upgrade schedule within the next days.

Due to system maintenance the weblog service (blogs.ethz.ch… and blogs.uz.ch/…) is not available from Monday 24.11.08 at 18.45 until Tuesday 25.11.08 at 08.00.

We apologise for any inconveniences which may result from this scheduled downtime of the service.

Yves Serrano overhauled the ETH WebCD compatible theme of our blog service. Navigation and layout of the static pages have been improved, subtitles are now optional.

Today our Weblog Service has been updated from WordPress MU Version 1.0 –> 1.3.3. Now the Weblog Service shares the code base with the most recent WordPress Version 2.3.3. The new WordPress MU offers a revised tagging system, UTF-8, more possibilities in the blog admin view,…, and a new widgetized ETH WebCD theme. The complete feature lists are available at the WordPress MU-Forum. Enjoy the new WordPress features!

Is there any chance of recovering lost ETH Weblog data posted between December 19 2007 and February 01 2008?

Below some suggestions which might be helpful for partial data recovery:

Internet data search:

• Via Google Cache
  Google partially caches pages belonging to Google indexed blogs. Example: enter “site: blogs.ethz.ch/oas” in the Google search form and the search will be restricted to blogs.ethz.ch/oas. Continue in “advanced search” and restrict the date to a 1-2 month period. The result may be the missing blog entries. Instead of clicking on the link click on “cached”, there you should now be able to view your data. In particular, archive pages are cached.
• Web Archive
  The “Internet Archive” can be found at http://web.archive.org. Enter a URL to see all its’ existing versions. However, the web archive is more effective when going back 1 / 2 year and more. In our case, it is unfortunately not very useful but I decided to mention it anyhow.

Copy data from an RSS reader:

If you or any other person have an RSS feed subscription for your blog, you may be able to use information from the RSS reader to restore the missing data (Benjamin’s tip). You can even post a delivery request for your missing blog entries on your blog.

Data search on your own browser:

Since it is possible that you have viewed your own blog posts on your browser you might still find them in the cache if the browser cache has not been emptied since. Maybe you know someone who has viewed your page, and your site might still be in their cache. Depending on your settings, it’s possible that only images and CSS files are cached, in which case you will unfortunately not find anything.

• Firefox
  To find cache data in Firefox enter “about: cache” in the URL box. Then click on List Disk Cache to view a list of all cache entries. Click on any entry to see the cache file’s name and location. We recommend using Strg + F (or Apple + F) to search for your blog. Enter URL incl. year e.g. blogs.ethz.ch/myblog/2008. Listed below are two cache readers as examples (there might be other better ones)
• http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/mozilla_cache_viewer.html IE Win, Mozilla Win
• http://echoone.com/filejuicer/ Safari Mac (particularly for Mac OS X

Sooner or later every cache gets emptied or updated. If you want to try and save your data, you must do it now.

The weblog service returned to a fully functional state.

Unfortunately, all postings, comments, new blogs and any changes on established blogs of our service between 19 December 2007 and 01 February 2008 are lost and could not be recovered. Regrettably we are unable to revocer a functional database from more recent backups. Please consult the Blog Support <blog-support@id.ethz.ch> for further questions on this issue.

The weblog team apologizes for the trouble caused. The faulty backup procedure will be examined and improved.

Yves Serrano has just released a new layout for the ETH Weblog Service.
This layout (WordPress Theme) is fully compliant to the ETH Web Corporate Design guidelines. The layout can be requested from our Weblog-Support for “Corporate Blogs”.

We have found a good solution to an interface (XML-RPC) for ETH Weblog Service for external blog editors.  We have tested various products such as Ecto, Mars Edit, and ScribeFire and found them to work flawlessly.

There are several possible ways to release a posting to your blog:

1. Open your blog’s administrator page with your browser by
entering the blog’s URL + “/wp-login.php” and then log in with
your Nethz username & password.

2. Use the “Blog this” interface of various Internet services,
such as the “flickr” photo service.

3. Use a desktop blog editor. (A list of blog editors can be found here.)

We have successfully tested ScribeFire (formerly known as Performance) and will show you how to configure it:

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