The lists to blogs transition

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Once upon a time, I filled a little void in my life -- the one that many people fill with weblogs -- with the xml-dev mailing list.  For some reason due perhaps to my generation, or the way my head is wired, I find it easier to pull together an email response than a blog post.   That's probably not true for most people, and now a milestone may have been crossed since the xml-dev list has been offline since about the beginning of August. (An inquiry about this to https://xml.org/xml/contactus.shtml returned "500 - Internal Server Error.")  An alternate archive is at https://www.stylusstudio.com/xmldev/ so I guess the little nuggets of wisdom scattered among  the doctrinal disputes in the Church of XML can be mined in the future, whatever happens to the lists.xml.org site.

Another former outlet for my pedantry was the Yahoo Service Oriented Architecture list. That's still going strong, but I unsubscribed awhile back when I realized that I was still tangled in the same permathreads that made my life (in 2002-2004) as co-chair of the now-defuct Web Services Architecture group something less than idyllic . The shark-jump for me was an immense thread on how to model an internet controlled lightbulb in a purely RESTful way.  (For the record, I think ZapThink has the last word on the whole REST - SOA issue: "In many ways, however, the debate about Web Services and REST is as pointless as arguing whether a hammer or a screwdriver is a better tool.")

So, I guess this means that I'll have to do a better job of updating my various weblogs if I want to stay in the thick of things.  Fortunately, the Windows Live Writer tool I've been dogfooding is now publicly available.  As Steve Maine puts it:

I've tried a bunch of blog editing solutions in the past (BlogJet, Outlook, Word, you name it) and Writer is the best that I've seen so far. It nails the basics (easy setup,online/offline support, WYSIWYG editing, categories) and has some cool features that I haven't seen before (the live preview where it applies your blog's CSS to draft entries so you can see what it will look like before you post it is very cool).

So, does anyone know what happened to dear ol' xml-dev?  [Update: It's Baaaccckkkk...]