CLOWNALLEY SITE DOWN.

Perhaps some of you have noticed that one of the best clown sites– Pat Cashin’s Clownalley.net, has suddenly gone away.

To be more accurate, the website is still there– but all of the archives are gone

It’s not by design– sadly, Pat Cashin, who has been working tirelessly on the site for the last three years, and had amassed easily over 3000 digital photographs, videos, and other ephemera about circus clowns throughout history, had an incident where he in error deleted his blog. So far Blogger (a Google-owned company where Pat did his amassing) has not responded to his pleas to restore his blog from the backup tape.

This is a huge tragedy– clownalley.net was a great service to clowns and clown historians across the world.

In their defense, Blogger is a free service, and people are supposed to use it at their own risk, and they do provide a backup or export capability, but sadly Pat never used it. (this blog also uses blogger, and I do backup on a semi-regular basis (although I’ll be doing it more often)

There is still a chance that Blogger will respond to Pat’s pleas.

Cross your fingers, and hope for the best (and if you know anyone at tech support for blogger at google, maybe you could put in a good word or two?)

And in the meantime, let’s hope that despite this tragedy, Pat will continue to work his special magic to make clown geeks like us happy.