bavatuesdays

I break my prolonged radio silence and come out of retirement to update you all on a pressing matter.

You see, it looks like our friends over at Prof Hacker have been hacked. And in case the site disappears shortly at the hands of their evil occupiers, let me reproduce the proof below from this post.

As I write this post, the ProfHacker numbers look a little something like this: since we launched on July 26 our authors have written 510 posts, our commenters have left 3,985 comments, and our readers have loaded 308,901 page views. We’re all so very grateful for the interest and enthusiasm with which this project has been greeted, and we’re surprised (in a good way!) with how quickly it’s taken off.

And now for some big news.

You won’t be seeing any new posts for a few days. We’re taking a short break in order to pack up and move our project to its new location. Starting Monday, April 19, ProfHacker will be hosted by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

What does this mean for you, the reader? Well, the subject matter, style, and tone of the site will remain the same: our contract allows us to maintain editorial control. Furthermore, the crackerjack team of ProfHacker authors will remain the same.

The web address will change to something new, but fear not: the old address will continue to work by sending you to the new site. As of Monday if you type into your web browser, you’ll automatically be re-directed to our new location. If you click on an old link to one of our posts–like –you’ll automatically be redirected to that post’s new location at the Chronicle web site. So if, for example, you’re a blogger who has written something that links to one of our posts, your link will still work. If you subscribe to our RSS feed, you’ll need to change the address of the feed to which you subscribe, so check back next week for what that new address will be.

I know you’re used to getting your 3-post-a-day fix from us, but just be patient for a bit and please come join us on Monday at the Chronicle!

Now, we all know that this is a hacker, I mean who would parade their staggering numbers over the past 10 months, and quote post and comment numbers stats only to drop a bomb like “We’re moving to The Chronicle of Higher Education“? This couldn’t be a devout group of digital humanities professors looking to spread the good word and grease the wheels of innovation in higher ed, right? No way, these folks are committed, they understand the power of audience and readership, and the fact that people depend on a sense of intimacy and unmediated relationships to form larger communities within this emerging field. I mean, no digital humanities profs worth their salt would enter into a contract with a reactionary publication that would force them to reiterate that they are being allowed “to maintain editorial control.” No way, impossible. I mean you have a good thing going, and even if your blog is more akin to a Chicken Soup for the Soul of HigherEd than say a strident voice of freedom and self-defining will which characterizes the inimitable bava, there’s no way you would sharecrop (thank you, D’Arcy) on the servers of the Chronicle under a contract that turns your readership into pageviews because of a quick start, and renounce any sense of true ownership in order to shill for the Chronicle. Inconceivable!

So, I want to send my best wishes over to the fine folks at Prof Hacker, and hope that they soon straighten out their hacker problem. It’s never fun or easy to be hacked, it’s so violating—it really makes you wonder what this whole space is about sometimes. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if after this experience they got a bit gun shy about the whole idea of starting a blog and providing semi-useful information to folks on a regular basis—it can be dangerous work with all kinds of seductions and shortcuts.

My thoughts are with the Prof Hacker crew in this, their darkest hour.

In other news their is a great movie coming out this Monday titled “Shill or be Shilled” —looking forward to that one.