i've received a few emails over the last two weeks from readers, friends. as you may have noticed, every so often when you visit snackfight, you'll see the listings off to the right (books i'm reading, music i'm listening to, et cetera) and not much else. it looks like the main entry of the page has totally disappeared. the first time it happened, i didn't think much of it. i just typed up a new entry and rebuilt the page. but then it happened again. and then it started happening every day.
i hit google and began poking around on the site of the company that makes my blogging software, movable type. i can't say enough good things about movable type, they are an awesome bunch of people. however, after combing through their various support documents and FAQ files, i still couldn't figure out why my site was constantly erasing entries.
most blogs have multiple entries on one page, listed in descending order with the newest entry at the top. check out my brother tim's site chari otaku for a solid example. i have snackfight set up to post one entry at a time, and to display only the last one day's worth of entries. this way, whenever i type up a new entry, my site rebuilds with only one entry on the front page. the previous entry is moved to the archive. typically, i only post two entries a week.
if i were to post an entry on monday, then force my site to rebuild on wednesday, you wouldn't see an entry after the front page was rebuilt. that's because my publishing system will only put entries on the page if they are less than a day old. since i didn't type anything on tuesday or wednesday, the publishing system would spit out a page with nothing in the spot where my entries usually go. so, for some reason, my site was rebuilding itself, resulting in a blank front page! curious.
when i was trying to figure out why this was happening, i thought about the comments feature. most blogs allow you to post comments, so you can say snarky things to the author and have your words displayed below theirs. i've always thought this was pretty lame, especially when you consider the people who obsessively post comments on blogs. they usually have a blog of their own, so why are they typing on my site when they could be typing on their own? this is my site, i make the rules, and only i get to talk. i have snackfight set up to disallow comments. when a comment is posted, the publishing system will rebuild the page. and—guess what—if a comment is posted on an entry that is more than one day old, and the page is rebuilt, the entry disappears. i found the reason, but not the culprit.
as i said, i've disallowed comments on my site. so how could somebody—anybody—be posting comments? i went to the "view all comments" page in my site's backend to find out. there, in a neat list, were comments such as "VICODIN XANAX NOW" and "give herr more pleasure tonite!" and " cialis, viagra 2 your door". the times that these comments were posted corresponded to the times that my site mysteriously disappeared.
this is insane, but it looks like somebody has written a robot that sneaks past the form-based commenting system on sites running movable type and posts comments about drugs and other spam-esque topics by directly manipulating the cgi scripts on the server. the comment is posted, a rebuild is forced, and my site breaks.
so, i upgraded to version 3.01 and strictly disallowed comments using the new configuration settings. then i changed the server permissions on all of the scripts that have anything to do with commenting. hopefully, i've nipped this problem in the bud and i can continue to bring you my cutting-edge content and sly observations for months and years to come. if you are reading this and it's been a few days, then my work-around was successful. if you're staring at another blank page, then it wasn't.
oh wait...