The Glass Castle

The Dowbrigade is bereft and depressed, listless and out of sorts. We are walking around in a viscous miasma of pain and loss, lashing out at innocent bystanders and loved ones alike, whoever happens to be in the vicinity. Everything seems dark and hopeless. And it’s all Dave Winer‘s fault.

You see, for the first time in three years, our blog is gone. The Dowbrigade News disappeared from the blogosphere a week ago, and shows no signs of resurfacing. It’s like someone intimately close to us has died. A huge gaping hole has opened at the center of our life, and nothing makes sense anymore. There seems no purpose to our efforts and we go through the motions of our day in a faded daze, like a washed-out broadcast signal of a black and white sitcom on an ancient TV in the mountains of a third world country.

How could this alarming state of affairs possibly be Dave Winer’s fault? Ah, let us count the ways.

It was Dave Winer, Blogfather and mythical figure, marching out of the misty dawn of the Blog Age like some cybernetic Johnny Appleseed, sowing blogs like mad right and left, who drew us into this mad cult in the first place.

He had just been named a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School, and his first project was to set up a Manila Blog Server and offer free blogs to the entire 80,000 member Harvard community, including alums like us. His next move was to start the open Thursday night meetings for anyone curious about what he was up to.

It was into one of these meetings that the embryonic Dowbrigade wandered, by mistake, one warm June night in 2003, and met Dave. By the end of the meeting we were hooked, and have been blogging every day since. Now, when denied the rush of regular posting, we get the shakes, can’t relax, and feel sick. Clearly, Dave Winer’s fault.

In addition, it is that Manila server, which Dave set up three years ago, which has ignominiously kicked the bucket, taking down the Dowbrigade News and all of the other blogs lodged therein, including the blog of the Thursday Night Meetings

It seems that keeping our blog server up and running is beyond the ability of the gizmo geeks at the World’s Greatest University. Apparently, there are only about a half-dozen people in the entire world with enough Manila mojo to run a server, and now that Dave has moved on to greener pastures, none of them is within two time zones of Cambridge. Once again, obviously and directly Dave’s fault.

Finally, it’s Dave’s fault we haven’t already moved to an alternative Blogging platform. Due to Manila’s fiendish complexity (for administrators, not users, or we would never have figured it out) and susceptibility to comment and backtrack spam, the invisible digital gnomes who keep the server fires stoked have set up a brand new Word Press server at Berkman, and are “encouraging” all users to migrate their blogs from Manila to WP. Of course, now that the old server has crapped out, we can’t even do that, which is why the Dowbrigade is currently writing under the pseudonym “Glass Castle”.

Besides, we don’t want to migrate. We like Manila, and have grown used to its quirks and idiosyncrasies. It has lots of features WP doesn’t, like the ability to alter page templates, add graphics to said templates, link headlines to the story sources. easily include enclosures for pod and videopod casts, statistics, built-in aggregator and more.

Again, without a doubt Dave Winer’s fault for designing Manila with the discriminating blogger like the Dowbrigade in mind, and making it so difficult for us to accept a less robust alternative.

So here we are, adrift and despondent, reduced to blogging on a borrowed, makeshift, nascent site, with no flow and no way to tell our old readers where we are. And yet we blog on. We are unable to stop, addicted to the simple act of sharing our experiences with the aether. Clearly, it’s all Dave Winer’s fault.