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BLOGS BOGGED DOWN: Technical Troubles With Six Apart's Software Upgrade Put Web Log Updates on Hold for Day

Posted on: Saturday, 17 December 2005, 15:00 CST

By Jon Van, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Tribune

Dec. 17--A blog fog descended on much of the Internet Friday as a leading server of Web logs suffered technical difficulties.

Recent postings of many popular blogs, including those of Chicago Tribune reporters Maureen Ryan, Eric Zorn and Steve Johnson, were offline for at least a day because of troubles at TypePad Blogs, a San Francisco-based service of a privately held firm called Six Apart.

The trouble started Friday morning Chicago time when Six Apart technicians did routine maintenance on the firm's computers, said Jane Anderson, a company spokeswoman. "They installed a software upgrade and the storage device didn't come back up as planned."

While technicians got the computers working later Friday, they said it could take a day or longer to get the most recent postings back online.

Anderson declined to say how many bloggers use Six Apart's services, but she did say that the company's bloggers get more Web views than those provided by any comparable service.

Like many Internet companies, Six Apart started as a hobby. According to the firm's history, Mena Trott and her husband, Ben, began creating Web log software in 2001 after the Web design studio where they worked closed. That software, first intended to support Mena's blog, became a product that now supports a company with 60 employees.

The firm's blog service had technical problems last month and offered its clients as many as 45 days of free service as compensation for their difficulties.

Some Internet fans wondered if Friday's problems were because of insufficient computer capacity to support the volume of blogging the company processes, but Anderson said that's not the case.

"After our problems last month, we put in supercapacity," she said. "This was just related to a particular storage device."

jvan@tribune.com

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Copyright (c) 2005, Chicago Tribune

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Source: Chicago Tribune

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