From 2007 until about a month ago, I wrote on three blogs that lived at blogs.harvard.edu. There was my personal blog (this one here, which I started after retiring my original blog), ProjectVRM‘s blog (also its home page), and Trunkline, a blog about infrastructure that was started by Christian Sandvig when he and I were both fellows at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society (and which I kept alive with very occasional posts since then). The image above is from those blogs’ header images.

All three are now re-homed. This one is at doc.searls.com (a URL that had redirected to blogs/harvard.edu/doc for many years), ProjectVRM’s is at ProjectVRM.org (a URL that had redirected to blogs.harvard.edu/vrm address) and Trunkline’s (which had been at blogs.harvard.edu/trunk) is now at trunkli.org.

Their hosting service is Pressable.com, a WordPress subsidiary that worked with the Berkman Klein Center to make sure that every link on the Web pointing to pages at those three Harvard-hosted blogs now goes to those pages’ new locations, without anything being 404’d. Which is just. freaking. awesome.

My thanks and gratitude to all the people who helped, both within those organizations and in my own network of friends. Together they demonstrate that the Web is a living archive and not just a whiteboard.

I started this blog in August 2007 after the host for my original blog went away. (That blog has been preserved, however. Find it at http://weblog.searls.com.)

At the time I was told something like “Hey, Harvard has been around since 1636, so your blog will last a long time here.” Well, the duration will be a bit less than sixteen years: Harvard is shutting the server down on Friday. [Later: it didn’t.]

I just got this news here, in an announcement posted in March. I missed it until Rogers Cadenhead (@rcade) told me about it on Twitter. [Later: the announcement was put in an obvious place: in the blog’s dashboard header. I still missed it. Disclosure: sometimes the obvious is not apparent to me.]

So I am scrambling now, with the help of friends, to move the contents of this blog to a new place. Hopefully, that will be blog.searls.com or searls.com/blog or both. We’ll see. [Later: it landed here at doc.searls.com, which had been a redirect URL aimed for many years at blogs.harvard.edu/doc.]

Two other blogs I run—ProjectVRM and Trunkline—also need to be moved. ProjectVRM is the one that matters more. If all goes according to plan, projectvrm.org will map to the same blog in its own new place. Trunkline will go to trunkli.org. [Later: both of these are (as of early July 2023) in the midst of both staying where they are and moving elsewhere. ProjectVRM should appear at some point at projectvrm.org.]

Here are my final Harvard-hosted posts on ProjectVRM and Trunkline:

• Now it’s time for something incompletely different
• It’s all provisional

My thanks to the Berkman Klein Center for hosting these blogs for so many years, and for the amazing community it serves— and in which I remain a devoted member.

The image above is of a truck I borrowed being towed away after the engine blew up in King City, California, back in 2005. It’s not a good illustration of what’s going on, but the best I could do in a hurry. I’ll find a better one later.