Day: July 26, 2003

All TTLB functions appear to be back to normal. Let me know if you still see any anomolies, but methinks everything should be OK now…

OK, I’m pretty sure I’ve identified and fixed the problem.
How’s this for obscure: The way the Ecosystem works, at a high level, is that a job is submitted for each weblog which goes out and downloads the text of the blog’s front page, and then parses it to extract links. In debugging that routine, I traced the root problem to the fread command in PHP: instead of downloading the whole page, it appeared to be getting only the first few hundred bytes. Hence: only a handful of links would be found.
Now, I am fairly certain that when Hosting Matters moved servers, the version of PHP being used was updated to 4.3.2. (I can’t prove it, as I don’t have access to the old server now — but it’s definitely 4.3.2 on the new one).
Interestingly, if you read the PHP manual, there’s note that the behavior of fread has been changed in version 4.3.2. I can’t quite match what I’m seeing with what the note describes, but it seems awfully suspicious.
Especially since I replaced the fopen/fread combination with the new function get_file_contents, and shazam: all appeared back to normal.
Anyway; I’m running a one-off catchup run of the scan routines now, and if all goes well, things should be back to normal in a few hours. Will update again later…

Still not getting the power of the Internet:
FoxNews has the Hunting for Bambi story.
Only problem? They are still running the original story, with no reference to the new piece proving it false. (And even worse, there is a reference from the new piece back to the old, disproven one…)
New link via the recently-returned Spoons….

2003 is on!
So go visit Amish Tech Support, A Small Victory, and Meryl Yourish and throw some pledge dollars in to support Magen David Adom .
You might as well, ’cause nothing works around here. I’ve now debugged the source of the Ecosystem problems down to the actual link-scanning job that hits each blog. It is running perfectly — except for some unknown reason, it is now only returning a tiny fraction of the actual links each blog has. Utterly frustrating…