Now You See It - Now You Don't

I got the tap on my shoulder last Friday, 12/8. I took a picture of my dashboard the following morning.

It's a rule of thumb, in IT, to avoid making major system changes on the weekend, when you depend upon other organisations for support. Unless you can get some performance guarantee from them, anyway.

So I spent the weekend thinking about my migration. And I studied the Blogger Help forums, and observed the many duplicated experiences therein. And I asked myself several questions.

1. What was the change in FTP path? Why all of a sudden are folks being told to change "/" to "."? Enough folks do it, and it works, so we know that's a fix. But they add "I've had this account for over a year - why am I changing it now?".
2. What was the "Clear cache and cookies" bit to revive the post editor and photo upload scripts? It's good that clearing cache and cookies is a working solution, but remember that people do access other websites besides Blogger / Google. Clearing cache and cookies affects access to all websites (short of clearing just Blogger / Google cookies under Firefox - and we won't even start the FF / IE debate just now).
3. What's with the repeated "I just migrated my account, and now my blogs aren't in my dashboard", followed by the online procedure:
   • What is your account and your blogs?
   • OK, the problem's fixed - you're good to go.
   What was fixed there? Is this another episode of The Silence?
4. What's with the team blogs, where the order of account migration seems to affect blog accessibility? Does it relate to the original owner account being migrated first or last? How does the original owner of a Classic blog affect migration overall?

Too many questions. I'll migrate during the week - when the problems surfacing during the past weekend have been identified and laid to rest.

And that's where my fun started. Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday - I did my regular work, and updated my blogs. Repeatedly. And each time I published a change, I would see the normal

Your blog published successfully.

with a twist.

Now, you can do even more with your blog!.

In other words, I got the tap on the shoulder. I was being initiated into the secret invitation only Beta migration.

OK.

From my schedule, I concluded that Wednesday would be the best day of the week to migrate.

Tuesday, I prepared for the migration.

• I froze changes to the blog contents (a standard business precaution).
• I removed all non-essential administrators from each blog (no team blogging to confuse issues).
• I backed up my blogs.

And I got up Wednesday morning, and looked at my dashboard. And it was as it had been a week ago. No Beta notice.

The tap had disappeared. No migration this week.

(Edit 12/13 23:00): It's back.
(Edit 12/15 17:00): It's gone, again.
(Edit 12/16 12:00): Still gone. Added the pinned Migration Status indicator at the top.
(Edit 12/17 12:00): Still gone. And, noting a Comment below, I don't appear to be the only one being played.
(Edit 12/17 18:00): Still Off. And apart from this game, I am nervous about migrating with Christmas coming.
(Edit 12/18 13:00): It's ON! Had a very interesting chat with AMR, and she clued me in on this post from Buzzie a week ago, too.
(Edit 12/20 23:00): It's OFF!
(Edit 12/21 08:00): Still OFF.
(Edit 12/23 14:00): It's back - ON again!
(Edit 12/25 08:00): OFF again.
(Edit 12/26 10:00): ON again!
(Edit 12/30 08:00): Still ON for me, though discussion in the forums suggests that it's not on for everybody.
(Edit 1/17 08:00): OFF again.
(Edit 1/17 10:30): ON again!
(Edit 1/25 18:00): Now, It's Gone For Good and the stampede has started.