A Grovelling Apology.
An abysmal performance yesterday; I can only say how terribly sorry I am for the trouble I caused you all.
When I took the site down before I had my last operation – I managed to delete the back-up copy as well. It turned out that the only back-up copy in existence was Gildas’ version which was in the form of Word documents – 1,500 of them.
After a couple of months of painfully trying to put the posts and multitudinous comments back in place, a friend became aware of the problem and kindly volunteered the services of his ‘software genius’. I’ll call him Webby.
Webby was indeed a genius, and wrote a programme which could pull the information off the word documents into containers that WordPress could reformat back into posts.
Trouble was, Webby and I were communicating through a third party – fatal. He didn’t know that my site was automatically programmed to publicise new posts via Twitter, RSS feed, e-mail and Facebook – I didn’t know that he was about to feed 1,500 ‘new-but-old’ posts back into the site…
Within an hour, as some of you know to your cost (and annoyance) hundreds of e-mails started to flood into inboxes from ‘Anna Raccoon’, RSS feeds failed under the strain, Twitter timelines went berserk, and it appeared that Ms Raccoon’s output had risen to ludicrous levels by tens of thousands of words a minute…
I had no idea how to stop it happening – conspiracy theorists were diving under their desks as I apparently announced that Gordon Brown was back in 10 Downing Street; forums went into meltdown on hearing that Tony Blair had got the Nobel prize – yet again; Lord Ahmed was once more marching on Parliament with ‘10,000 Muslims’ and Vera Baird was supervising the election in Uganda…
Fortunately, the blog has only been going for six years – otherwise I would have been announcing the abdication of Edward VIII and the repeal of the Corn Laws.
Finally after 690 e-mails/RSS updates/Twitter updates, and dozens of anxious inquiries as to whether the site had been hacked, was this a ‘DOS attack’, and ‘was it safe to open the links in the e-mails’ I appeared to be sending out, the flow stopped.
Nothing brilliant or even useful that I had done – my host server had decided they were under attack from some Russian hacking group as back-links within the posts tried to mate with their intended destination – and ‘black-listed’ the IP address of the ultra respectable and reputable software company the deluge was coming from!
Ooh, er, Whoopsie doo-dah.
It could have been worse – the site originally had near 5,000 posts on it, and 70,000 comments. Fortunately Gildas hadn’t saved all of it, and Webbie hadn’t had time to find a way to attach the comments – which would have gone out as an update to all who have elected to follow ‘comments’.
It doesn’t bear thinking about.
I do appreciate that many of you in the media and the legal profession use your Twitter for work purposes, as you do your e-mail – and I am genuinely sorry for the inconvenience, and Yes, I do understand that 690 e-mails counts as something more than ‘inconvenience’.
If you have anything less than 690 e-mails, and you haven’t already made the decision to ‘blacklist’ Ms Raccoon (who could blame you?) can I suggest that you check your spam folder? For sure there are ‘stragglers’ out there in cyberspace jostling for a chance to eat your broadband…
As a mark of my contrition, I think a suitable period of silence from Ms Raccoon is called for; and besides which I am in the middle of moving to two different houses in two different countries – so possibly me concentrating on just one thing would be a good idea? Mmmmn.
Hanging my head in shame – and packing t-chests…
I’m still very grateful to Webbie though; and his boss who volunteered him for this job ‘as a favour’…
Anna
- Andrew Rosthorn
October 2, 2014 at 5:25 pm -
Never mind, Anna. I enjoyed re-reading about thirty of them. Got not much work done yesterday afternoon, but marvelled at your regular prescience, looking back on your opus. Tell Webby it was a turn up for the books!
- Fat Steve
October 2, 2014 at 5:26 pm -
Stuck back in the electronic stone age with less idea of what an RSS feed is than a caveman is likely to have known what an US aircraft carriers were likely to look like I have been blissfully ignorant of your and other peoples troubles –good fortune with your move though and look forward to when you resume writing
- FrankH
October 2, 2014 at 5:32 pm -
I use gmail. When I realised what was happening I set up a filter to move all your posts to Archive. I’ll disable it now and look forward to your next insightful, inciteful post.
- Amfortas
October 2, 2014 at 5:35 pm -
I did not pull my hair out. I figured you were ‘doing something’ and a glitch had occurred. No worries. My block-highlight and delete procedure swung into action.
- Jim McLean
October 2, 2014 at 6:46 pm -
Ach away and don’t be daft. Could’ve been worse. Could’ve been Ed Milliband’s blog!!!
So nice though to see someone actually taking responsibility and writing personally. Very entertaining too. I would have loved to have heard the various conversations you were having at the time!! - The Jannie
October 2, 2014 at 7:18 pm -
I can hear you now, exclaiming “good heavens” and “dash and bother” . . . or words to that effect.
- Ted Treen
October 3, 2014 at 2:24 pm -
Or even “Wee! Poo! Bum! Fart!” – (Swearing, Stephen Fry style).
- Ted Treen
- Michael J. McFadden
October 2, 2014 at 7:27 pm -
No problem m’lady. Easy enough to deal with, and just glad to hear that it was just a computer burp and not someone actually attacking your site. It was obvious it wasn’t something intended, and it was indeed an impressive reminder of the work you and other dedicated bloggers out there have put into your creations. By any chance, while going through all the conversion etc, did you use that Word conversion opportunity to make at least a rough estimate of the number of words in your primary postings? From what I saw, the figure looks to be pretty clearly well over a million — and likely up into several million? Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse 5” and Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” were both just a tad under 50,000.
– MJM
- JuliaM
October 2, 2014 at 7:30 pm -
After the IT related disasters I’ve seen, nothing about the arcane world of bits & bytes fazes me, Anna…
- The Blocked Dwarf
October 2, 2014 at 7:31 pm -
Finally some excitement round here and I MISSED IT! Après moi, le déluge de Raccoon.
- Norman Brand
October 2, 2014 at 8:23 pm -
From what I read of them, they were all good stuff and worth saying. Don’t worry.
- Joe Public
October 2, 2014 at 8:59 pm -
To err is human; to make a monumental cock-up requires an IT ‘expert’.
No harm done Anna; I did however fear the worst – you were archiving them before pulling the plug. Again
Look on the bright side – Immigration, NHS & BBC IT cock-ups cost UK taxpayers hundreds of millions £.
The AR pfingerfuffel merely reminded your followers of all your wonderful previous postings.
- Ho Hum
October 3, 2014 at 12:02 am -
Just as an aside, I trust that, having been a victim of even the relatively simplest of things going wrong, you’ll think very carefully before blithely joining with those carping from the sidelines when thing go awry with things that are ever so much more complex?
Everything is always awfully easy until you have to do it yourself…
- Hysteria
October 3, 2014 at 12:28 pm -
I don’t recall Ms Raccoon being a sideline carper ?- but the point is valid in the general sense I guess…
But I am glad I had turned my Twitter off a few weeks ago (can’t really see the point of it to be honest!)
- Joe Public
October 3, 2014 at 12:56 pm -
“…..you’ll think very carefully before blithely joining with those carping from the sidelines when thing go awry with things that are ever so much more complex?”
It depends how much it costs me.
Our landlady’s misfortune has been mildly inconvenient to her followers; Immigration, NHS & BBC IT cock-ups have cost her readers* actual money.
Unless of course they are also IT bods paid for what they promised, but couldn’t deliver.
If you paid for a new car, but it wouldn’t even start so you couldn’t drive it off the garage forecourt, would you expect a refund?
- Mudplugger
October 3, 2014 at 9:15 pm -
Slight parallel with the jail sentences handed out yesterday to the assemblers of those home-made, fake ‘bomb detectors’ (basically an empty plastic box on a stick) which they managed to sell for around £2,000 each to police, defence and security units in many countries.
What on earth were ‘professional buyers’ doing spending millions on those devices without anyone checking that they actually worked ? And how many of those utterly incompetent ‘civil servants’ have actually paid with their jobs and pensions ? (Rhetorical question – we all here know that answer).
Be half-incompetent in the private sector and you’re on your bike – but in government, Police, NHS, BBC, etc, there’s no personal pain from failure, even on a monumental scale, so they’ll just carry on failing – mmm, that could be the title of a new film, anyone got Barbara Windsor’s number ?- Joe Public
October 3, 2014 at 10:34 pm -
“What on earth were ‘professional buyers’ doing spending millions on those devices…”
‘Earning’ their bonus by negotiating the price down from £3k per box, to only £2k per box.
- Joe Public
- Mudplugger
- Hysteria
- Jim Bates
October 3, 2014 at 1:32 am -
Here in the bucolic midlands, where we measure internet speed in furlongs-a-fortnight, didn’t notice a thing.
Just keep the sanity clauses rolling Anna. Gotta have me daily fix! - Carol42
October 3, 2014 at 2:11 am -
Must say after the initial shock I enjoyed reading some posts written before I found you a few years ago. BTW my 4 year scan was clear and how is your friend who shares your rare cancer doing?
- Leg-iron
October 4, 2014 at 1:38 am -
I’d only just joined Twitter. I thought the deluge was normal…
- Helga
October 4, 2014 at 2:46 pm -
Ha! I wondered what was going on! I ended up unsubscribing to your blog because of the emails coming through at a squillion miles an hour! I’ll now re-subscribe!
- Kath Gillon
October 5, 2014 at 10:47 am -
I also enjoyed the chance to read old posts as I was not following you until recently.
I look at it this way sh1t happens and no one died so no harm no foul.
Good luck with the moves and come back soon I love reading your posts. - Ian R Thorpe
October 5, 2014 at 10:07 pm -
Anna, what you need is a link in your bookmarks to Wayback Machine https://archive.org/web/web.php
Go to the main Wayback page and enter your top level url (https://www.annaraccoon.com), click and you will get a calendar up showing when a snapshot of your site was taken. It might not be quite up to date but it will be an almost full archive.
And so when you delete your site and your backup and Gildas’ 1500 word docs seem daunting, (has he never heard of a document merge – he could recreate War and Peace in one mouse click) you know all your wit and wisdom is safe and retreiveable on The Wayback Machine.
best,
Ian
{ 25 comments… read them below or add one }