Two site things
Earlier this week, many people got served an error page instead of the site. I ended up turning off some of the plugins we use, and as near as I can figure it, the issue is that in certain cases (for instance, someone comes in and requests a super-crazy URL, possibly in an attempt to see if there’s a security exploit left unpatched… it’s unclear what causes this) the site refuses to generate the page, throwing an error instead, and that error message gets cached as the current version of USSM… and served out to a ton of other people. We saw this a couple months ago when, under load, it essentially cached and served out a blown version of the home page and I went through this fire drill again.
Now, the why and when I’m still not clear on, or why it seems like it’s far more likely to serve this up to people trying to access www.ussmariner.com instead of ussmariner.com — I have no idea. But I think we’ve got some reasonable solutions worked out, so I’m on that.
The other — I’ve read complaints that the RSS feed sucks since the redesign. I don’t know what the scoop is: I subscribe myself for troubleshooting purposes, and I haven’t seen anything, and the new theme shouldn’t affect the RSS pieces at all. If I had better repro steps, there might be more I could do, but right now I’m trying to pin down the problem.
And obviously, this again demonstrates the need to hand tech duties off somewhere else, which would be totally awesome.
Couple of things.
I mentioned the RSS feed in the game thread. I didn’t say it sucked, but it was WAY behind. I don’t know if that’s still the case because your posts don’t have a timestamp, but just so you know Google Reader picked up the feed two minutes ago.
FWIW, when I get the feeds they’re in perfect shape – no issues wrt the content as far as I can tell.
The feed has been more reliable the last few days. I didn’t get anything for a while after the redesign then was bombarded with several days worth of posts at once. Since then it’s been coming through as you post them.. so that’s good.
I noticed I wasn’t getting the RSS feeds for a couple of days, and when I checked the feed link it appeared differently on the site than in my feed reader. I updated it, and everything started showing again.
Also, and I apologize if this was covered elsewhere, for some time the post author wasn’t displaying (it is now). Did anyone else mention this, or might it have been an anomoly for me?
Yeah, I fixed the author/date-time while I had the site code open.
I have to laugh that I wrote those words.
I think I missed the joke, though I did hear “continuum” after I read “date-time” and was surprised at the power you wield.
“for instance, someone comes in and requests a super-crazy URL, possibly in an attempt to see if there’s a security exploit left unpatched…”
Well, I suppose they found out the answer to that question.
And obviously, this again demonstrates the need to hand tech duties off somewhere else, which would be totally awesome.
Is this a hint for a USSM reader to step foward and offer his/her services?
I had to switch RSS feeds as well to get everything working correctly. It’s now updating, but is it supposed to only show the first few sentences of a post? It used to show the whole post before.
It publishes the whole thing unless there’s an author-inserted break in it (as this post does)
Nice subheading.
So, it would seem that I was the only one that wasn’t having any RSS problems then?