Blame Typepad

We know from your emails that some of you check this blog more than once a day. If you are one of those, you've undoubtedly noticed some strange things afoot at the California Wage Law blog lately. Here's what happened.

A few weeks ago, Typepad introduced a new post editor. As a post author, I hate, hate, hate it. It makes formatting easier and it allows more flexibility regarding use of links, embedded photos and a host of other features, but it slows the process way down, causing the sort of "lag" that gamers experience when they overload their antiquated sysems with the latest MMORGs. Not all Typepad blogs have it. Apparently, ours was one which was randomly assigned the new post editor. We were made involuntary beta testers.

Along with the release of the new post editor, Typepad brought out a bug regarding the posting status of particularly posts. It has long been the case that, when we write a new post, we don't have to publish it immediately. We can publish it immediately, or we can save it for later, either as a "draft", which is not supposed to be published, or as a post to be published at a particular date and time, which we often do. For example, I often come across wage & hour related information which isn't any more or less relevant if weeks pass before I publish it. I'll save those so that the blog can continue to provide content even if Mark and I are in trial, or I'm out having (another) surgery, and Mark is slammed trying to do the work of two lawyers.

This month, Typepad has been very unreliable regarding drafts and future posts. Several times, when we wanted to delay a post for a few days, we would change the posting status to some date way in the future, i.e., July 25, so we could edit the post or decide a week later whether or not to use it. Typepad suddenly began to disregard these changes, and published everything on the date we originally told it to publish, so you might have looked at the blog and seen a post dated a month in the future, and then watched it disappear a few hours later.

Last week, every single post that was published was a post that was supposed to be published this week, while I am supposed to be out recovering from surgery. The more timely content sits in "draft" stage, and we'll sort that out as we have time this week. The post you are reading right now was originally a post about the DOL's wage recoveries. We edited the post a bit, and to our dismay, both versions were published, even though we changed the original post to unpublished status. Typepad tells me that "Our engineers are aware of this issue, and a fix is being released within the week. Once this fix goes live, you should no longer experience this issue."

I hope they are right, because if it doesn't get fixed, I'm going to have to move the blog to another host service. --Mike

Comments

[The Complex Litigator]

My sympathies. I can only hope you are right that a fix is in the works. I, too, use typepad. Luckily, I suppose, I have not yet been moved to the new posting engine. According to Typepad, everyone will be ported over by the end of July. As a regular visitor to your blog, I saw the signs of Typepad's bugs more than a week ago, as your posts appeared and vanished and reappeared without any text in them.

Good luck.