podcasting.opml.org

Tuesday, June 19, 2007 by Dave Winer.

Last night a message was posted on one of the podcasting support mail lists, observing that an opml.org directory was showing some weird content. It was pretty late, so even though I found the problem right away, I didn't fix it until this morning.  

It wasn't a hack job as some people thought, and I hadn't decided to monetize the directory by pointing it to some porn sites, rather it was a dangling pointer left over from a server purge in April, when I was able to turn off four of my six servers, thereby saving a bunch of money every month. The directory had been hosted on one of the machines that I turned off. The ISP reassigned the server to a new customer, who was keeping a directory of porn sites on the machine.  

Fixing the problem was simply a matter of redirecting the sub-domain to one of the two remaining servers and telling it to display the OPML file for the directory.