Bud the Teacher

    I’m headed out in a few hours to help facilitate a meeting for folks from different writing projects who are thinking strategically about their web presence(s).  Should be an interesting opportunity to check in with colleagues, meet some familiar names, put faces to them, and work together to learn more about how to take the good work of National Writing Project local sites online. 
    As I prepare to depart, though, I wanted to point out some great comments and feedback I’ve gotten regarding why teachers join corporate groups.  Steve mentioned my post on the subject from a while back and his community’s gotten active in explaining some of their passion.  That’s good, and they deserve more of a response from me — but I can’t pull it off right now.  Watch for it soon.   In the meantime, read the original post and chime in.
   Look for thoughts about web presence(s) this weekend via the blog, assuming I’m not all consumed by the conversations.  Which is entirely possible.  If that happens, look for them next week.

Good news from my hometown school district.  Jason writes:

I’m actually sitting at my computer at school writing this post.

My district FINALLY decided to unblock Blogger for educational purposes.  They used my TOK blog as
evidence for its usefulness and they finally agreed… so now you are
free as PSD teachers to utilize it in your classroom… and please do.
The more of us that stand up and show how we can properly use blogger
for students and teachers alike, the more likely that they will see it
as a step forward in our use of technology.

   Congratulations, Jason.  Well done.

    On Monday, I installed Elgg .8 over at OldeSchoolSpace.  It was a bold thing to do, as the code had just been released.  But it worked great.  I was really pleased with the way in which the new version handled files — it’s a better interface and we’re about to start uploading lots of digital stories.  I tested out the file uploads, created some blog posts in our class community, and added some files.  My podcast feeds were working great and all was right with the world.
    Then, this morning, I went to the site to show my cooperating teachers how the file uploads work — and the entire class community was gone. 
    Completely.  Absolutely.  Gone. 
    So were three of the four other communities.  I was floored, and certain that I mis-installed the software.  I’m not so sure that I did.   
    The wonderful tech support folks at BlueHost helped me through pouring through the databases, looking for data.  It wasn’t there — it looked like it was manually deleted. 
    Turns out it was.
    I went through the raw access logs, looking for anything funky.  These lines are some of what I found:

66.249.72.52 - - [24/Apr/2007:20:32:47 -0600] "GET /speech/community/delete HTTP/1.1" 200 471 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.72.52 - - [24/Apr/2007:20:34:15 -0600] "GET /leadership/community/delete HTTP/1.1" 200 471 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.72.52 - - [24/Apr/2007:21:09:01 -0600] "GET /digistories/community/delete HTTP/1.1" 200 471 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

I am only learning to speak the language — but it looks to me like Google found and executed the delete command for these communities.
  Why’d that happen, and how can I keep it from happening again?  My error?  A flaw in the code?  A malicious attack masquerading as a Google bot? 
    I’ve restored the old data and we’ve lost a few days of work — nothing too serious.  We have backups of the student work.  But before I reinstall the .8 code, I’m curious about what happened and would appreciate any response you can send my way.