And So It Begins... [Respectful Insolence]

…the long-awaited migration to WordPress, promised ever since NatGeo took over:

Notice: ScienceBlogs.com will be migrating to a new publishing platform starting on the evening of Monday, May 21 at 7 PM Eastern Standard Time. Please do not add any comments or posts between then and Tuesday afternoon. We will update this page when maintenance is complete and normal blog activity can resume.

More recently, we were informed:

Please plan to make any posts on the Moveable Type platform before 7 pm ET; otherwise they are unlikely to be moved to the WordPress platform during tonight’s “catch-up” migration. The catch-up will find and copy any newly created posts and comments (not changes like typo corrections to existing posts, or updates to drafts already imported) made to the blogs after April 18 and add them to the new site. When you view your blog in the early afternoon of May 22, it should have all posts and comments that were live on the MT site as of 7 pm ET on Monday, May 21.

Fortunately, after we complained about the original plan, which would have lost about a month’s worth of comments and required us bloggers to manually migrate the last month or so worth of posts over to the new platform or lose them, it looks as though it will be less than a day during which your comments might or might not make it over to the new blog. Not ideal, but better than what had been originally planned. Be that as it may, it’s going to be weird to have things be so silent for around 18 hours, but it’ll be a nice little break. If I get an itchy blogging finger, I might just post something over at http://respectfulinsolence.net, which is basically the site I thought about moving to a year ago but ended up putting in mothballs.

Naaah. Probably not. Even my massive ego doesn’t labor under the delusion that you can’t survive without a heapin’ helpin’ of the Insolence, both Respectful and Not-So-Respectful, that I churn out on a daily (well, week daily basis, anyway) on just one day.

Anyway, patience, dear readers. Things should be better after the migration, although, alas, ScienceBlogs blogs will all look more “uniform.” I suppose that’s the price to pay. In the meantime, I see little point in posting anything until after the “all clear” is given. During that window, things might look a little strange in that posts that were here might well temporarily disappear, only to reappear later. Finally, things will only look somewhat different after the migration occurs, and there will be new features. Now maybe one of these days we can persuade the powers that be that this blog collective could use a major redesign.

Anyway, if you want to comment on anything and be assured that your trenchant brilliance will make it over to the new platform for sure and not disappear forever into the ether, be sure to comment it before 7 PM EDT! I’ll post something when the migration is over. Because I’m a paranoid type, however, I probably won’t post any lengthy bits of Orac-ian logorrhea deconstructing the latest pseudoscience or extolling the latest cool science until Wednesday morning. I want to kick the tires a bit and make sure everything’s working right before doing that.

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