It's even worse than it appears..
Friday, January 13, 2023
As many people noticed, the nightly emails didn't go out last night at midnight. The theory they had was that it had something to do with the reported outage at Twitter. Only tangentially. The cause was a linkblog item without a link. The mail-sending software had never encountered such a thing before, and it turns out there was an assumption that all linkblog entries would always have links. So the software lost its mind and went boom. Easy to find, the error message and stack crawl were the last thing in the log. Adding a protection against such a situation was also easy. This is how software gets mature. Sooner or later every weird case shows up and hopefully it will be patched well and documented, so next time it happens the email goes out as it's supposed to. This is all part of the "It's even worse than it appears" philosophy of Scripting News. And, how was this related tangentially to the outage at Twitter? Well that's what the stupid linkblog entry was about. As Maude used to say "God'll get you for that Walter." In this case Walter is me and god is the Software God. #
2000: "Programmers pray to the Software God, Our Lord Murphy, the one who makes sure that anything that can go wrong, does."#
Iconfactory: "Last night at about 7:30pm PST, Twitterrific customers started reporting problems accessing Twitter via the iOS app."#
An RSS OS#
  • What if you built an operating system around RSS?#
  • FeedLand is going down this path. #
  • Feeds are so easy to work with in FeedLand, I want to build all the features with RSS now.#
  • BTW -- I am not leaving outliners and OPML behind. #
  • There's a small feature tucked away in the Source namespace that allows an RSS item to be an outline. #
  • A global network of outlines moving at the speed of RSS.#

© copyright 1994-2023 Dave Winer.

Last update: Saturday January 14, 2023; 9:08 AM EST.

You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)