Gremlins at blog?

A bizarre and mysterious error occurred at the site. On Monday, September 26, I posted an entry called “The evil afoot in Perugia: prosecutors seek life sentences for Knox and Sollecito.” It consisted of my summary argument that Amanda and Raffaele are innocent and that a terrible perversion of justice has been and is still being done against them. Then late tonight, 9/27-9/28, I realized the entry wasn’t there. Or rather it had been changed to an entry in draft status (that is, not posted at the public site) that only included a news report about prosecutors seeking life sentences for them. Somehow that had replaced the entry I had worked on and posted. A further oddity is that comments that had been posted in the original entry are still in the off-line post that replaced the original post. So somehow the original post was lost but not the comments I had added to it. Fortunately, I found a draft version of the original post in Word. But there were further revisions I had made in the article after originally posting it, and they are gone, so I will have to recreate those and re-post the entry tomorrow.

- end of initial entry -

Jim C. writes:

Nah—more likely a stray keystroke

LA replies:

No way a stray keystroke could make this happen. It’s very disconcerting. I worked on something, posted it, polished and added to it online, and then it vanishes, or rather it changes into something else. I have no explanation for how this could have happened.

Also, I have proof that the entry was indeed posted; the title “The evil afoot in Perugia: prosecutors seek life sentences for Knox and Sollecito” is in a Google results page:

The evil afoot in Perugia: prosecutors seek life sentences for Knox …
1 day ago … The evil afoot in Perugia: prosecutors seek life sentences for Knox and … Or that
the two white college students Amanda and Raffaele formed a …
www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/020565.html

But when I clicked on the link, it took me to the changed entry (which I had temporarily put online, and then put back in draft status again), which only featured a news story and had none of my text. I know the changed entry is the same entry as the original, because it has the same url.

Chris H. writes:

Here is the Google cache version of the missing blog entry. I found it by Googling “The evil afoot in Perugia: prosecutors seek life sentences for Knox” and clicking on the “Cached” link next to the first result. Hopefully it contains the modifications you made to your draft and saves you from retyping them.

LA replies:

Thank you so much for this. I will re-post the entry in the morning.

LA writes:

Before Chris H. found the full posted text at Google, I sent my original draft of the entry, which was still on my computer, to reader Eric G. with this note:

Question. When you read and replied to the Amanda post at VFR on Monday, did it look something like the below? I ask this, because I realized tonight that that entry had simply disappeared from the site. I have no explanation for how this could have occurred. I have an entry posted at the top of the main page telling what happened, as far as I understand it.

Eric G. replied:

Yes, that looks like the entry. I noticed last night that it had disappeared.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 28, 2011 01:03 AM | Send