Puzzled Blogger
Mood: Had enough
Listening to: Ghost song in my head: 'Trials and Tribulations' from JCS
I've just had the following Awful Experience, which threw me for a loop.
1) In the morning I turned on the computer to check my email and for any blog comments. Everything seemed fine. I wrote a new blog post and posted it.
2) Went away for a coffee.
3) Returned to my blog to make a change... it said 'server not found.'
4) Every so often I tried again... after a while the message changed to: "The page isn't redirecting properly. Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete. This problem can sometimes be caused by disabling or refusing to accept cookies."
5) I tried other blogs and discovered that all the blogigo.co.uk blogs came up with the same error. All blogigo.com, blogigo.de, blogigo.cn and blogigo.at blogs were still accessible.
6) If I went to blogigo.co.uk's home page, everything came up in German.
7) I tried to view my blog in the Safari browser - same sort of error message about the redirects having gone wrong.
8) Switched to my PC and tried to get my blog in I.E. 6. There was no error message but nothing came up either - it kept loading, and loading, and loading.... I finally stopped it.
9) I kept an eye on the feeds in Bloglines and Newsgator - none of the Blogigo blogs updated at all.... in fact they started to show errors in the Bloglines feed window.
10) I checked for Firefox updates - there was one, so I installed it. No change. Checked extensions (only three) and pop-up ad settings - nothing made a difference.
11) Eventually (after a few hours of this), an email arrived - it was a comment to one of my blog posts from Kate Blogs at Itisi. Did this mean she could view the blog? I still couldn't.
12) I emailed my sister for input, and she said she couldn't see my site either, and got the same 'redirect loop' error message.
13) Got a message from Iain at Posted Notes to say he could see my blog fine, using Safari on the Mac. But my Safari on my own Mac was still returning error messages - and so was Firefox.
14) Around this time I discovered it was possible to edit and post on my blog - I followed the link on the comment email from Kate Blogs to manage the comment, and was able to activate it... but I still couldn't view my blog. Everything was in German, but I knew my way around. If I clicked on a link that said 'Freundschaften', it said 'buddies' in the URL.
15) I looked in mein profil and discovered I was apparently (and nonsensically) a citizen of Afghanistan (something I tried to change several times several months ago, and it never made any difference). I tried again, pulling down the list of countries, and looked for the United Kingdom. It wasn't there. Nor was the UK, Great Britain, Britain or Scotland. I don't think Großbritannien was there but I could be wrong. I still didn't want to be in Afghanistan, so I changed my location to 'Irland' - much nearer home!
16) Switched over to the PC to look for my blog on I.E. 6 - and suddenly it was viewable!!
17) Tried on the Mac to get my blog, but both Firefox and Safari gave me the 'poor redirection' error messages. Quit them and opened them again. Error messages. Shut the Mac down, started it up again. Error messages.
18) Tore out a few handfuls of hair.
19) Did some searching on the issue (discovering in the process that the Google search engine is indeed vastly superior to WebFetch. So Pacian hinted, and I believe him now). The 'redirect' problem seems to plague unsuspecting surfers from time to time, and the issues are almost always to do with Firefox and/or Safari, with I.E. sometimes doing the 'can't load the page either' thing... so actually I'm not all that convinced by that argument. I think they all do it.
20) Was still thinking about how Bloglines couldn't get any information either... looked at our feed pages. Got error messages of a different type - "Fatal error: Call to undefined function apache_request_headers() in /home/p3210/html/blog/rss.php on line 5".
21) Cleared my Firefox cache and also (reluctantly) removed all my Firefox cookies. Quit Firefox. Started it up again.... Bloglines, Newsgator and Caedes didn't recognize me any more, but my blog was still showing me the 'not redirecting properly' error. Sigh.
22) Went to blogigo.co.uk's home page and...... this time it showed up in English! Showing English blogs! Not a word of German. I clicked on the link to my blog, and.....
23).... IT SHOWED UP!
24) Stared at it as though I had dragged it bodily out of a terrible quicksand. Checked its pulse.
25) Struck by a strange suspicion, I started up Safari and looked for my blog... and it showed up there as well. The mystery is that I didn't clear the cookies or cache for Safari, so there should have been no change.
26) Started to suspect it had nothing whatsoever to do with clearing the cache or deleting cookies. Somebody just fixed an error somewhere out there... it never had anything to do with my computers or settings. Surely?
27) Logged in and went into my profile - I was back in Afghanistan. Pulled down the menu of countries, and looked for the United Kingdom. There it was, right next to the United States.
28). What a waste of a day. I had all sorts of other plans for it. I should have turned the computer off and ignored it till later, but as soon as I got troubled about this, I couldn't concentrate on anything else. After all, there's nothing more disturbing than looking into the Mystery of the Missing Blog only to discover that an entire continent has gone missing as well.
I need a holiday somewhere nice - perhaps Afghanistan.
