this blog is girtby.net

Saying Hello to Mephisto

If you are reading this, I have converted successfully over to Mephisto.

There are still some outstanding issues to be resolved, such as:

• The theme is the default Mephisto theme, I need to migrate my old theme over to Mephisto. As a result some formatting may look wierd.
• Some older permalinks (specifically the /archives links) won’t work right now.
• Assorted sidebar content is still missing.

Everything else should work OK though. If not, just let me know.

For now I just want to see if the resource usage problems that I was having with Typo are still occurring with Mephisto. If not, then I’ll start working on the above issues.

You didn’t need to tell me – 15 duplicate new entries in both of your feeds tell the story themselves.

Someone tell me why in near-2007 noone heeds Atom’s admonition to store IDs in the database along with items so that they won’t change across site moves and migrations.

Aristotle, that’s an excellent question.

The preliminary answer seems to be that Mephisto generates its own IDs based on the date published, internal database ID, and the FQDN. At first blush I’d say Mephisto is broken, but that’s another topic.

As a result there is nowhere in the database for a stable article ID. Hence although Typo uses a GUID, this is not preserved when the article comes across to Mephisto.

Hmf. I just got a third set of copies of your posts masquerading as new.

PS.: sorry to be so grumpy. This is just a personal pet peeve, because it’s such a small detail for feed publishing software but has such a big effect on the feed consumer user experience. So when it works correctly it’s a good sign that the developers have done their homework… and unsurprisingly, most haven’t.

OK, now I no longer apologise for being grumpy. I just deleted the 7th set of fresh dupes! Can you please please fix the damn thing? It’s getting to the point that I’d rather not have to keep cleaning up the mess anymore, even though I am very reluctant to unsubscribe.

Aristotle,

I honestly haven’t got a clue why you are seeing so many dupes. I have deliberately not touched the live site config for days now. Also I am not seeing any dupes in my aggregator (NetNewsWire).

However I’ve just noticed that the <id> of the main feed document includes the year, and hence would have just changed. Perhaps this would have caused the most recent round of dupes?

(The obvious point that the year should probably not be included in the feed:id is well taken. I’ll raise it with the Mephisto devs.)

Doesn’t explain the previous dupes you were getting though. I would imagine that at worst you would have two sets of dupes, one for the Mephisto conversion, and one for the new year.

Some older permalinks (specifically the /archives links) won’t work right now.

I can confirm that! I was looking for your old “Don’t use Wingdings” article, and Google is still pointing to broken links.

I’m still working on a fix for the older permalinks. If you want you can change /archives/... to /articles/... and it should work.

OK the older /archives permalinks should work now.

It might have been my aggregator partially at fault too, I’m no longer sure. I got another batch of dupes after writing that comment, but it seems to have been the last. Let’s hope.