Incident Report X041201 Bogus Recent-Posts Links

orcmid> sostegno> 2004> X041201> 0.50 2005-04-17-20:50 -0700

Category: Reliability	Incident ID: X041201
Priority: 9 - Corrupted Data	Status: Closed
Subject: Site Accountability	Repaired in: none
Assigned To: Dennis Hamilton (analysis)	Reported By:  Dennis Hamilton (2004-12-15)
Date Opened: 2004-12-15	Date Closed: 2005-04-17
1. Summary 2. Remedies	see also: X041201b: Phantom Pages

1. Summary (2005-01-22):

I was cruising down through some Recent Items links in Orcmid's Lair and I landed on an HTTP 404 page, indicating that the blog entry wasn't really there.

It seems that there are some entries identified in Recent Items links for which there is no blog-entry page.

This page lists the phantoms and is the model for placeholders at the phantom locations.

2. Remedies (2005-04-17):

1. The non-posts showed up in a sequence of "recent posts" lists and I was able to create a "phantom page" to place at each of the archive locations to catch anyone who follows those links.  (I suppose I could use "nofollow" now but I didn't know about that when I did this.  I also didn't know that the term is used with regard to pages that are intended for search spiders and not human readers, but I don't know what else to call them.). 

2. On January 22, I placed a phantom page at each of the target locations.  This is part of my general policy to not regenerate pages, even when I change page templates.  The pages on the blog reflect the progression of the blog layout and features over time.

4. I now am updating my site status pages to reflect that the problem is cured.

5. The problem has not occurred since.  What's interesting is that there were blog entries of those names in my drafts but I had never published them.  How Blogger.com became confused about that is a mystery.

0.50 2005-04-17-20:41 Complete the notes and close this incident

The problem has been cured but this note was not completed and the status page needs to reflect closing the problem.

0.00 2004-12-15-17:36 Create Initial Incident Identification, Analysis, and Proposed Actions

Capture enough material so that related investigation can be defined and this report can be polished later.  Manage with a  job jar.  Although I am in a high-level of cluelessness around this topic, I can at least let visitors to my sites know that much.