Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

Recent Items
 
Simple Geek Pleasures
 
Pictures from Home
 
Seeing Double
 
Candling Phish
 
Pent up Blogophilia
 
All-Clear #1
 
Microsoft Scores for Respecting Its Customers
 
Difficulties of Wireless Mesh
 
What Is RFID Technology?
 
Hark, Is That an Arphid That I Smell?

Honey, Where'd You Put the Bloggo?

"I want to post but the feed is backing up!"

We Are Experiencing Technical Difficulties
 
Please Stand By
 
Incident Response Procedures are in effect.
This site feed is suspended to prevent access to corrupted data.
 
Updated status will be posted as the situation becomes clear.
 
Meanwhile, there may be damaged or missing pages.
Follow links in feed entries with extreme caution.
 

On Saturday morning I noticed that my Atom feed had been disturbed.  I applied my recently-practiced incident response procedures and learned more about the importance of fire drills.  Ross Anderson says "it's when the red lights go on for the first time that the worst mistakes get made."  If I didn't have that in mind when I practiced everything last week, it would have been even more difficult to not be rattled, stay level-headed, back up the site, and set up the standby announcement (seen already by subscribers to this blog's Atom feed).

After some research, I discovered that the problem with feeds is annoying but not fatal, so I am hereby taking down the standby notice.  I am leaving the incident notice on the site status page.  I have also done the good-guy thing and submitted a report to Blogger support.

If you are a subscriber to the Atom feed for Orcmid's Lair (and many other Blogger-intermediated web logs), what you'll encounter during this incident is links to archive pages instead of links to the blog entry that the feed entry is about.  If you want to find the genuine article from the feed entry, you'll need to then scroll down the archive page until you find the desired entry.  If you then follow the permalink in the dateline of the article, you'll be at the article's post page the way you expected in the first place.  That is, unless there has been some failure in the archive page being posted successfully, as seems to be the case at Google Blog.

I have not made a thorough investigation of the change, but it would appear to impact every Blogger Atom Feed that has any posts since some time on Thursday afternoon, September 2.  (I did not mean to be so prophetic when I posted about the risks of slip-streaming in "Your%20Message%20Here" and it seems I need to come up with a heavier 2-by-4 or a better aim.)

I will minimize my posting until it is determined whether this is a permanent condition or it is alleviated after someone wakes up down there at galactic central. That's just to avoid subscribers seeing reissues of lots of article feeds when the correction is put in, as I trust it will be.

posted by orcmid at 9/6/2004 11:22:48 AM