This is pretty worrisome. How many of the bloggers here compose and save their work offline? Once again, I just posted a blog that I wrote on the blogger site. I have to get out of that habit. Then there's the problem of trying to save in digital format in several places all the blogs written directly on line. I have 164 published blogs and 105 drafts written... if they disappeared, as they surely will, it would be very hard to reconstruct. There's a lot to be said for the hard copy book.
All of my stuff is backed up on dropbox, evernote, and two usbs, excluding the handwritten drafts that I do first. It's just common sense. Hell, sometimes I lose drafts just copying and pasting stuff into my blog's editor. Imagine if I had been writing that whole time!
emacs is a text editor (as opposed to a word processor; it works with plain text, like the textboxes you type Hubski comments into), with a very long history, mostly used for editing programs. It can be customized by adding scripts in an (archaic) dialect of lisp. Modes are the most important sort of extension; they make emacs an environment for editing particular types of text, like different programming languages, HTML or TeX documents, todo lists, emails and blog posts. There are also modes that make it a web browser, irc client, game of tetris, terminal emulator, coffee pot controller ... The linked blog post is about an emacs extension for interacting with blogger, among other things. Rather than interacting with blogger through your browser, you do so through your text editor, making it convenient to keep local copies of your posts.