Tech Daze

We had a pretty good spike in both traffic and subscribers yesterday and I see that several of them dropped-off this morning. I have a feeling it's because there was so much churn last night. Those of you who know about this can safely skip this post.

For any new readers/subscribers, "churn" is when your feed starts listing a bunch of old posts and when you click on them, there are no new comments and you can't really tell anything has changed - it has, you just can't tell it. This happens when I go through and change a link, tag, or just generally edit the post.

Unlike many, many - let's face it: most - blogs, The Rundown and all of the blogs associated with The Weirding are regularly maintained. About once a week or more, I just start reading the blogs from wherever they start and go right through until I get bored. I am checking for errors and there are usually quite a few. They're mostly little grammatical and spelling errors - "of" when I meant to type "or," muddled sentences, etc. - but there are also dead links, miscategorized tags, and other things I need or want to change.

In some RSS readers, especially "Live Bookmarks" in Firefox and other browsers, these older posts will then show up at the top, like they are new or have new comments. This is called "churn" - well, it didn't really have a name, but it's kind of the same thing (technically-speaking) that happens with e-mail servers when they get a whole lot of mail at once and some of them get dropped or sent through multiple times, so I just adopted the term and applied it to this.

I know it can be frustrating to see a slew of posts in your reader and think someone's left a comment or they're new entries, only to find out they're from like two years ago and nothing seems new about them at all, but it's just part of what I have to do and it can't be avoided. There's been a whole lot of churn here (and elsewhere) lately because of the new design and my efforts to integrate the blogs into the site, which comes mainly from my reworking the tags - and while I apologize, there's nothing I can do about it.

This maintenance improves every aspect of the blog - how it reads, the accuracy of the information it provides, how easy it is to find things, and more - but I know it can be a headache, so I usually post a little "watch for churn" entry to let you know I'm about to get into things. However, I have posted a lot of those lately, so I made a general post early-on this weekend just to let you know I was going to be doing it off and on all weekend long (because subscribers and hits both usually dip on weekends) and some of you may have missed it. Then yesterday, we blew-up! So everyone who just found us probably missed it.

Again, this usually only happens once a week or so, so this much churn is unusual, but this has been a particularly busy month - almost all the blogs got facelifts, we took-on new sponsors and let go of others, there is new content on the way, and the entire site is undergoing massive changes.

So, if you're new here, you got on-board at an exciting time... but it's going to be messy for at least a few more weeks. I am hoping everything settles back down sometime in April, but I'm going to go ahead and say May just to be safe. Well, given my predilection for procrastination, let's go with June. Okay, July.

January, 2012.

That's a firm date; there's an ETA: January, 2012.

© C Harris Lynn, 2008