Where is waiterrant?

May 26, 2007 7:14 PM

What has happened to Waiterrant?

I check it out a few times a month, and when I tried it a week ago, it said it was down for maintenance. But, that was a week ago. Does anyone know what happened? He just disappeared. Is this unusual for a high profile blogger?

posted by generic230 to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

He was giving it a rest while he finished writing a book, I thought.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:32 PM on May 26, 2007

Sorry for piggybacking on your question, but I was wondering... For the first few days that maintenance message was up on Waiterrant, my antivirus program would pop up several notifications of intercepted Trojans every time I visited. It stopped doing that a couple of days ago; did anyone else have that experience?
posted by Soliloquy at 7:47 PM on May 26, 2007

Sorry I can't be more helpful, but this is all I know: he has repeatedly had tech problems in the past. The guy is not a designer and uses some outfit called SoundQue to do his (now) WP template. I don't know if they're good or bad but it's possible that something in their template or theme design interfered with WordPress.
posted by lackutrol at 8:10 PM on May 26, 2007

I don't know, but recently the RSS feed for the place has started publishing a slew of stories. I've not read any of them before -- they're about a restaurant he worked at after the Bistro, so perhaps this is stuff to come?

I never check the site, right enough, so perhaps this is all stuff that's been up for months but the RSS was borked.
posted by bonaldi at 5:48 AM on May 27, 2007

The posts in the RSS feed are all old. I've seen some other blogs commenting on it, but no hint as to the reason for the hiatus. It does seem odd that the site would be down at all, since he has a book deal with HarperCollins, it seems it would be more important than ever to keep posting regularly.
posted by Liosliath at 7:36 AM on May 27, 2007

I just checked it this morning...it's back up. Waiterrant.net
posted by CiaoMela at 7:44 AM on May 27, 2007 [1 favorite]

For future reference:

As some of you may have noticed, Waiter Rant was out of commission for the past several days. Somebody hacked into my site and inflicted enough damage to necessitate a total shutdown. The rational part of me knows that some 14 year old kid probably did this to get mad props from his geek homies, but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone I insulted over the years contracted to have it done. Call me paranoid? Hmmmmm....

I'd been wondering about it too. It seems like if you're going to put up any message at all about it being down ("Waiterrant.net is experiencing technical difficulties") it would make sense to explain a bit sooner rather than later.
posted by kyleg at 7:05 PM on May 27, 2007