Summary

Gruber noticed an unusual silence from readers and traced it to a broken automated task that generates the RSS and JSON feeds. Since his homepage is itself generated from the RSS feed, both the feeds and the homepage went unupdated — meaning seven posts he wrote went effectively unread by nearly everyone. What makes the situation notable is that not a single reader noticed or complained, contrasting sharply with a similar October outage where readers quickly surfaced a typo. He offers a wry apology for delivering a week's worth of posts at once.

Key Insight

When a site's homepage is generated from its own RSS feed, a silent feed failure can make an entire week of publishing vanish — and today's passive readership may never even notice.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 3

  Then, I remembered that the DF website home page is generated from ... the RSS feed.

• 4

  So, yeah, pretty much no one but me realized that I'd written seven new posts after the last update Tuesday night.

• 5

  My apologies for delivering most of this week's output all at once. We can pretend today that DF is a weekly newsletter.

• 6

  I almost always hear from squeaky wheels in the EU when I write about Apple and the DMA, for example, but I heard nothing.

• 3

  I never previously considered adding some sort of alert to check on this, because I always presumed I'd notice if new items I published weren't appearing on the home page or in the feeds.

Tone

self-deprecating, humorous