Intermittent outages have knocked Overlawyered offline for most of the past 24 hours, but it looks as if we’re back now. The problems began with spammer attacks on scripts from our old Movable Type days (moral: if you’re not using old scripts, remove them) and continued with out-of-memory problems.
Some elements of the site may still be missing or not up to date; I’ll be troubleshooting those as the day continues.
Quite an eventful night here: after Glenn Reynolds linked to my item on the Obama transition website and the plans it outlined for mandatory national service, upwards of five thousand visitors read the item and, as I’ve noted in an addendum, the people at Change.gov silently edited the passage in question to replace the controversial “require” language with vaguer talk of a “goal”. (Update Sun. morning: and now they seem to have yanked “Agenda” entirely).
Also, my thanks to commenters for their patience. I went out for an evening in the city and when I got back there were seventy comments in the moderation queue. I approved the whole batch, but inevitably there was one reader who was sure he was being singled out when his comment (#19) didn’t appear after an hour or two. (Update: thanks for correction.)
Prof. Susan Kuo of the University of South Carolina School of Law was in touch today to say that her talk of Thought Police the other day was intended in a spirit of light raillery, not as anything insulting or dismissive of my earlier criticism. Had that been apparent to me, I probably would not have given her post the kind of full-length and unsmiling dissection I did. As I say in a P.S. that I’ve appended to the earlier post, I’m glad to take Prof. Kuo at her word when she says she meant no offense, and I hope commenters will do the same.
The other day we relayed an account of a Ralph Nader rally at Dartmouth whose attendance was said to be eight persons. Other coverage now indicates that the number eight is the approximate number of Dartmouth students in attendance, and that other attendees brought the crowd count up to forty. Sorry.
For quite a while I’ve been getting complaints that readers in other countries — Australia, in particular — are locked out of Overlawyered with a “403 — you don’t have permission to access the server” error message. (Similarly, see these bulletin board discussions from New Zealand and Germany). Reader Stephen Mepham from Australia wrote to alert me when he encountered this problem on switching to a new cable provider, and helpfully included his IP number (the 777.77.7.777 thing). That allowed me to track down what had happened: in response to a series of spam and denial-of-service attacks, our hosting providers over the years have taken aggressive measures to exclude various large blocks of IP numbers (as well as country domains associated with spam and DOS attacks). I’ve now taken a few gingerly steps to relax these controls, which I hope should let more Australian readers access the site in particular. Should the attacks resume, of course, we’ll need to go back to tougher blocking.
If you’re a reader who’s encountered this problem or knows someone who has, give it a try again, and feel free to email me with a message along the lines of “Yes, now it works again” or “No, I still get blocked” — and try to include your IP address if convenient, which you can identify here.
As alert readers may have noticed, I began using Twitter recently (@walterolson) and have been experimenting over the past week with what it can do. I’ve now added Alex King’s Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress, which makes it possible to integrate blog functions with those of Twitter. I’m giving a tryout to two new functions:
* Now featured atop the rightmost column of this site is a list of my five most recent Twitter posts. Some are ultra-brief summaries of Overlawyered or Point of Law posts, while others point to law-related articles or news stories in lieu of writing them up at full post length, and yet others contain non-law-related or even personal content. If you want to keep abreast with these in something close to real time without coming back to visit the site itself, “follow” @walterolson (on your Twitter account) or use the @walterolson RSS feed (distinct from the regular Overlawyered posts and comments feeds).
* Once a day Twitter Tools will generate an Overlawyered post like this one summing up the last day’s Twitter mini-posts (“tweets”). In their native form, these roundups have a rather raw look, replete with artificially truncated URLs (of the tinyurl and is.gd variety), often not identifying the article source, etc. If time and inclination permits, I’ll try to clean these up and make them more Overlawyered-relevant by reinserting “real” URLs, via links, earlier/further reading, etc., maybe cutting pure personal stuff, etc.
* Here’s a list of lawyers and law types on Twitter. I’m listed at #230.
* This is all, obviously, experimental, and aimed at seeing whether the new formats appeal to existing readers and reach new ones. If it does work well, I might take further steps, such as systematically broadcasting Overlawyered content on Twitter (a reader volunteer might come in really useful on that). One step at a time, though.
* More: If you’re a reader whose Twitter posts might furnish good story tip material for this site, and I realize that, there’s a good chance I’ll try following you; I’ve already done three posts using material I found in Twitter streams. (This is by contrast with Facebook, where I follow a more conservative policy, and mostly accept as friends only those I “really” know or at least have emailed with a fair bit).
Many of our RSS feed subscribers lost their Overlawyered feeds when we switched platforms to WordPress this spring. I’ve just installed a plugin that should get things moving again, redirecting everyone to a single main feed for the site; those who want to follow comments can subscribe to this separate comments feed. If it doesn’t work for you, let me know.
Here. For the moment this is just a personal one; after I learn more about how it works I might try to get Overlawyered its own Twitter.