Regarding Jeremy's extended FAQ post, there's one important assumption made about the issue that isn't explicitly stated: people ask the question "what happens to my blog when I leave?" all wanting to hear the same response. Nobody wants to be told that their blog will be wiped. It's the same thing with university e-mail addresses—even though there are dozens of free services that offer better features, it's the principal of keeping what you already have and maintaining that important connection with the Case community. Speaking as a user, ITS should not be asking "are we going to allow blogs to persist?" They should be asking "what needs to be done to allow blogs to persist?" It seems to me that resources like alumni donations and other support for the university would be more easily encouraged by allowing continued use of these established services.

Statistically, I think ITS can justify the persistence of blogs on this service. The total student population is about 9,200 students (note that faculty—2,000 more people—can also make use of this service). Now, ITS probably doesn't expect all 9,200 students to sign up and be active—but since they're all eligible, the resources should exist to do so. Now, look at Home (or 'home dot cwru' as I like to call it)—this is an entirely student-run service, by the way, but I'm not looking at their usage or storage policies. Home has existed since 1998 and allows anyone to sign up (even alumni and unaffiliated users), yet they have only 10,600 user accounts—which isn't much larger than the student population at any given time. Many of those users probably just signed up to post in one thread and never returned, which suggests that there is an even smaller number of active users. I think if ITS reserves the resources to support the entire student population, usage statistics will allow for the persistence of blogs belonging to those separated from the university.

Finally, and practically speaking, ITS has the authority to impose whatever policies they see fit. The most obvious solution, from my point of view, would be to purge separated-user blogs that have been inactive for a certain threshold of time. Don't post in your blog for 6 months after leaving Case? Then you get a notification that your blog will be erased shortly. Another obvious policy would be to not offer continued tech support to users separated from the university, but still allow them to go about their business using the service.

In other news, you can probably tell I'm still tinkering with my template. All that navigation and side bar stuff will make a return at some point. It's much easier to build the template piece by piece. Individual entry pages still look ugly at the bottom—haven't customized that yet.

I finally got the number-of-comments-centered-in-a-circle working. If there's one place where CSS is a huge failure it's vertical alignment. Phew! Also finally decided on a trackback icon (a pair of quotes). It's the pink one!

The Blog@Case stats page shows me (exogen) as the top, I think, non-robot host making requests (unless one of those is Jeremy or another admin). I blame my template, for wanting to be tweaked every five minutes.