It occurred to me last night that I’d gotten less feedback regarding recent posts than usual. There were a few items I’d posted in recent days that I felt sure to hear from readers about, both yay and nay. But: nothing. Crickets chirping. I almost always hear from squeaky wheels in the EU when I write about Apple and the DMA, for example, but I heard nothing about my take yesterday that Apple has effectively pantsed the European Commission regarding App Store commissions.
I noticed this morning that the bot that auto-posts new articles to the DF account Mastodon hadn’t posted since Tuesday night. But it wasn’t the Mastodon posting bot that was broken. It was a different automated task that updates the RSS and JSON feeds. That’s what broke sometime between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. The Mastodon posting bot reads the RSS feed, and if there’s nothing new in the RSS feed, there’s nothing for the bot to post. Still though, I thought it was weird that no one who follows DF from the feeds had emailed, texted, or @replied to me to complain that new articles on the website had stopped appearing in the feeds. No one.
Then, I remembered that the DF website home page is generated from ... the RSS feed.1
So, yeah, pretty much no one but me realized that I’d written seven new posts after the last update Tuesday night. Oops. Needless to say, it no longer seems surprising at all that I haven’t heard anything from readers in a few days. My apologies for delivering most of this week’s output all at once. We can pretend today that DF is a weekly newsletter.
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The system that conked out that in turn prevented the feed generation script from seeing new content has conked out once before in recent memory — last October. But when it conked out in October I noticed within a few hours, because readers kept complaining about the same typo that I had fixed, in my CMS, but which was still visible on the home page, because the home page only gets updated from the feed content. I never previously considered adding some sort of alert to check on this, because I always presumed I’d notice if new items I published weren’t appearing on the home page or in the feeds. ↩︎