TechDirt asks a good question about Salon Blogs: "There's also a question about what happens if Salon goes out of business. Since they're rumored to only have a few months of cash left, will all those blogs disappear?"

Personally, I think the gloom and doom around Salon is overblown. However, because Radio Userland weblog data is stored on user computers, if Salon's Radio Community Server ever disappears, users will be able to choose a different community server and publish their entire weblog to it with one command. This is one of the biggest advantages of Radio Userland's unusual client/server approach -- you can jump from server to server relatively easy.

I moved this weblog from UserLand's server to PyCS (an open source clone written in Python) in around 15 minutes. I had to fix some URLs and I lost my existing theme, but if you have saved your theme at some point, it's easy to reinstate after a move.

Comments

Thanks, this was one of my concerns as well. I subscribed to Salon Premium a few months ago and then I heard it may vanish, now I want a Salon Blog but don't want it to vanish too.

I enjoy Salon.com but not the stress -- I'm only a reader though, Salon employees have much more.

Rogers, thanks for posting this.

People all over the 'Net are worried, I think in much the same way that investors are worried these days. "Is it safe?", "What if they go under?" We're hearing it from all corners.

Radio routes around the danger of shifting markets, at least to some extent, and it's important that people know this.

Some might find it of interest to take a look at the original home page for the Radio UserLand site. As you may remember, the software was quite different in November of 2000, but the philosophy remains.

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