Construction Note C000011 Master Feed Announcements

miser> construction> C000011> 0.00 2004-08-29 -05:57 -0700

These pages provide for the Atom Site Feed entries used in making the following announcements in the Orcmid's Lair blog feed:

• C000011B: Test Announcement.  This entry is inserted in the feed as a warning that tests are in progress and the feed may be disrupted by them.  This entry is advanced (given a new number) and added to the current feed as the most-recent entry. This will cause a warning entry to be seen as the latest content of the feed.  Being manually injected, the entry will disappear following an automated regeneration of the feed, although retrieved copies of it will persist.

• C000011C: Standby Announcement.  This is a complete replacement for the feed that injects a standby announcement as part of early incident-response activity.  It is more important that there be a good feed in place of a (potentially) corrupted one.  It might not be accurate, although it will be during testing.  This XML document is pre-advanced and stored in place of the current feed document.  It accomplishes two things.  It makes a "Please Stand By" entry available as its only content.  It makes a valid feed file for access even if it is not recognized as a new change, so that feed subscribers will not encounter a corrupted feed file.  This announcement will disappear as soon as a better feed document is restored, whether manually or through automated generation.

• C000011D: All-Clear Announcement.  This entry is inserted manually into the feed as an all-clear announcement following testing.  It is not used as part of a non-testing situation. This entry is advanced (given a new number) and added to the current feed (not the standby announcement, usually) to declare a test condition as completed.

These pages do not provide the XML documents, they provide the HTML pages that the "identities" (that is, the <id>-elements) of the feed entries are tied to.  The pages also identify how the element is formed and used.  This is not totally satisfying, and it will do for now.  [The unsatisfying part is that it is from my point of view working in the solution space, rather from the view of a visitor who encounters one of these entries in the problem space they live in.]

The reason for advancing the identity and the title of the entries is so aggregation software will not confuse a test announcement and the ensuing all-clear announcement as being updates of previous announcements.  It is less critical that the standby announcements be kept unique, but it is done for consistency.

Because standby announcements are set up to be applied quickly, without any preparation, the identification of their solo entry is incremented after use, not before.  A standby announcement is always "hot" and ready to be applied.

If there become multiple feeds on this site, there will need to be a separate set of master feed announcements for each one.  That is because entries are identified with particular feeds to ensure they are recognized and that aggregation software is not mislead by recurrence of an identification (or title).  

0.00 2004-08-29-05:34 Create construction set for the feed entries used  incident responses and repairs (orcmid)

These pages provide the grounding for corresponding XML documents used to insert announcements in feeds and to replace the feed suddenly to prevent unexpected access of feed subscribers to corrupted material.  A  Job Jar is set up for the development required here.

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created 2004-08-29-05:34 -0700 (pdt) by orcmid $$Author: Orcmid $ $$Date: 04-12-19 8:57 $ $$Revision: 8 $