The FeedBurner feed from The Complex Litigator is now supplied by the SquareSpace blog

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The FeedBurner RSS feed for The Complex Litigator is now supplied by the RSS feed for this blog at SquareSpace.  If you are subscribed to the RSS feed from The Complex Litigator through FeedBurner, you should continue to receive a feed.  If your feed has been disrupted (meaning, if I tinkered with something that I should have left untouched and broke something), the RSS subscription link in the right column will directly supply the feed to your preferred reader.

Please excuse our dust...

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but Step One to ready this blog for its move to SquareSpace is complete.  The Complex Litigator now has a new registrar.  You may notice some disruptions getting to this site today as new nameservers take over for those on Hostway (which did absolutely nothing to make moving to a new registrar painless and comfortable).  I am still hoping to complete the move over this weekend.  If you subscribe to this blog in a reader, you may wish to visit thecomplexlitigator.squarespace.com and use the new RSS subscription tool to update the source of the feed.

The Complex Litigator may experience brief "outages" as the domain registrar is changed ahead of hosting move

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The prior registrar for www.thecomplexlitigator.com provided no user access to custom DNS settings.  In advance of the move to SquareSpace for blog hosting, I am moving to a new registrar (although my old registrar seems determined to make that process as slow and painful as possible).  When the registrar changes, I'll need to change domain name servers.  That will cause a brief "outage" as the new information propogate through the top level domain name servers on the internet.  Since my current registrar is being "jerky" (a legal term used to describe certain registrars), I may not be able to control the exact time of the transfer, but Monday or Tuesday looks most likely.

Once that switch is complete, I'll redirect traffic to SquareSpace on the weekend of May 16th.  That switch will cause another brief outage (anywhere from hours to a day or two, depending upon how quickly your particular DNS server refreshes its data).

The Complex Litigator Blog will "move" on May 16, 2009

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Over the weekend of May 16, 2009, the CNAME DNS record that points to this blog on the Typepad service will be revised to point at this blog on the SquareSpace service.  I will post multiple warnings about the switch, with information about how RSS subscriptions will be affected and what to do in general terms to restore a feed to your preferred reader.  The copy of the site is nearing completion and can be viewed at thecomplexlitigator.squarespace.com until the CNAME record is updated.  There are a few hiccups left to iron out; a few posts were either mis-titled or mis-dated in the import process, but most of this blog has been copied over successfully.  SquareSpace offers more design flexibility and the ability to expand the site in a number of interesting ways.

Post frequency and miscellany

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Last week was pretty hectic, and this one isn't shaping up to be any better for different reasons, but The Complex Litigator will work to get back on track with more frequent posts as soon as possible.  For very short news links, the sidebar Twitter feed is a sort of micro-blogging adjunct to this site.

On an unrelated note, I've noticed a massive increase in trackback spam, most of it related to various pharmaceuticals.  The spam filters on Typepad have done a great job at catching that junk, but if something slips through, I apologize and don't follow those links.

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ANNOUNCEMENT: The Complex Litigator will soon be forced to migrate its RSS feed to a new location

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Feedburner, which provides the RSS feed from this blog to many readers, was purchased by Google quite some time ago.  Now, Google is in the process of moving the Feedburner service to its own servers.  The move is voluntary now, but will mandatory very soon.  I have read many reports of problems during the voluntary feed relocation period, which is why I have not yet changed the feed.  However, I believe that time is running out.  If you read this blog from a Feedburner feed, you can subscribe to the feed directly in newer versions of Outlook or various browsers.

UPDATE:  The feed from this site has been moved to Google's servers with no problem so far.  Many other users have reported problems with the move, but in this case it was trouble-free.  However, it isn't clear whether this will disrupt the site feed for subscribers.  If it does, give it a few days to sort itself out.

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The Complex Litigator is beta testing a new TypePad post comment system

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TypePad is currently beta testing a new commenting system called TypePad Connect.  This comment system will allow for threaded comments, cross-blog commenting, limited html code in comments, and associated pictures of the comment author (if a profile is established).

Because TypePad Connect is in beta, the comments here may end up getting hosed.  Or I may lose the ability to delete the occasional spam post that people try to slip into posts without my noticing.  Or it may work wonderfully.  The point is, we're going out on the bleeding edge here, and someone might get hurt.  Not that this will matter much in practice; lawyers and other readers of law blogs appear to comment less than readers of any other type of blog

UPDATE:  So far so good.  Comments are still on posts, and they are styled in the new format.  Also, please be aware that the comment system is driven (I believe) by javascript.  Your browser setting may influence what you see, particularly if you are running something like NoScript in Firefox.

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Avvo blog creates auto-updating list of blog ranks, based on Alexa traffic stats

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In an effort to provide something more objective, Avvo blog has created an automatically updating list of over 300 of the top legal blogs, based on Alexa traffic data.  Right now, The Complex Litigator ranks 188th on that list, which isn't too shabby given the lofty company found on that list.  Looking over the list, a decent number of California-based blogs appear on Avvo blog's top 300+.  Browse the list and see if you discover anything new for your regular reading list.

[Via Robert Ambrogi's Lawsites blog and @bobambrogi on Twitter]

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