Don't Back Down

Much of today, twitterfeed has been down. Which is okay - it just means that my blog posts don't get into my Twitter stream (just one of the reasons I don't like depending on third-party services). Last week, John Chow announced that he had set another new record, with more than $30,000 in income. Unforunately, if you haven't read the report, you may not be able to do so, because his site has been responding horribly of late (at least for me). I don't know what's happening for John - if it's a problem with his server, his software, or if he's just bogged down because of the latest numbers.

Frankly I don't care that much because I keep up with his blog through Google Reader, so I don't often have cause to visit. I only happened to notice that things were slow when I went to look something up, and realized that it had happened last week when I did it as well, so it seems to be an ongoing issue. Or it could be related to my own ongoing issues (but I don't really seem to have much of a problem with other sites). Whatever the case, it underscores the importance of keeping your site running.

For John, it may be just a bit less important than for the rest of us. Sure, he ultimately needs to keep things going because if he doesn't, those advertisers who pay up front aren't going to be happy. But for the bottom-dwellers like myself, we need visitors in order to get the all-important clicks. We simply don't have the pay-up-front types. So you need to keep things going! And lest you think this is pick-on-John-Chow-week, it's not. I also came across a problem on Problogger. The link, when clicked from the feed, returns a lovely message stating ERROR: The requested URL could not be retrieved. If you click the link it provides, it generally seems to work, but it's not very friendly to see.

My first guess is that it's a caching problem, perhaps related to a plugin or something that is off a bit. I've seen notes in Darren's feed before (usually about RSS readers needing to click on different links to vote in polls, for instance, and those usually don't work either), so this isn't exactly a new problem. But it just goes to show that even the most profitable - and popular - sites can have problems. Hmm. Maybe I spend too much time making the pages on the site accessible, because I work very hard to make sure that links don't just break, yet I don't have nearly the traffic of either Darren or John (not to mention the income).

If you use Movable Type, Byrne has put together a guide for updating old URLs to new ones. It is Apache-centric, meaning that it might not be exactly what you need if you use a Windows server for your installation, but even if you do, it might come in handy. I also find that it may not be the best route to take, since it uses mod_rewrite, and not everyone can use mod_rewrite (which can also be expensive in terms of processing). I personally prefer to use plain old Redirect for one-to-one matching, but ultimately it will depend on your URL path.

What is useful about the guide, however, is that you can use the guide as a jumping-off-point for making sure that you map the old locations to the new ones.

One other note that you might find useful about this whole concept: If you're planning to be down for planned maintenance - as the movabletype.org sites themselves were last night - let people know about it! Byrne posted to a couple of mailing lists, and made a comment on the blog, which is great. But what if you don't keep up on either of those regularly, or are away from being able to do so? Then you might be out of luck. I don't actually keep up with the sites as often as I probably should, but this would be the perfect opportunity for Twitter, and since Six Apart has an account already, it sure would be nice if they used it for this sort of thing.