Broken Technology

The RSS feed for this blog seems to have broken when I posted the new design. When I go to my iGoogle page, the last article for this blog is still the entry from April 14, “Infoquake” Reviewed on Fast Forward. Which means there are certainly a number of readers who have no idea that I’ve redesigned the website, and who will just assume I’ve fallen into a crack in the Earth somewhere until they decide to come browsing this way again. This happened the last time I redesigned the site too.

Broken computer monitor in the woodsI’m unclear why this has happened. The URLs for the feeds should still be in the same place. All of the articles that were in the old feed are still in the new feed. I did mess around in the database and fix a number of GUIDs (Globally Unique Identifiers, for those non-geeks in the audience) that were pointing to a temporary address. But that should only have affected your feed reader’s ability to mark the entry as read or not read.

At least you can delete and re-add the RSS feed to your feed reader. The syndication for my Amazon blog broke altogether several months ago, and my message to the Amazon technical support staff seems to have fallen into a crack in the Earth somewhere. Now I’m stuck adding new entries to my Amazon blog by hand.

Why is so much technology so goddamn fragile?

I joke about this all the time with my web programming customers. Chances are that if you see something drastically wrong with the website I’m managing — layout all fucked up, images floating all over the place, everything completely unreadable — it’s the fault of a single misplaced comma somewhere. Other industries don’t have this problem. I mean, if you’ve got a single board nailed crooked in your house, the whole thing doesn’t fall to pieces.

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