Del.icio.us have been doing some planned maintenance this morning which has revealed a glitch in my blog index script. At the moment, it polls the del.icio.us server for my most recent entries and then returns them to “standard output”. If I were running it from a command line that would be the screen but, in the automated update, I redirect the output to the XML file used by my website. However, because del.icio.us has been so reliable over the past few months, I’ve made the dangerous assumption that it will always return the expected data, which is why my index page presently says “No matching results”.

Now I’ve got the choice of increasing the complexity of the script to cope with the del.icio.us server being unavailable or just to live with it. For a relatively minor backwater like my site (Technorati rank: 498,891) it’s not the end of the world. On the other hand, I’d like to demonstrate intelligent design in my work.

I’ll have to see how much time I can find before it passes out of mind!

Tags: del.icio.us, web2.0, api, perl, blog index