December 26th, 2004
All the News That's Fit to Print?
Late news: Mystery Solved (mostly)
The New York Times has broken its permalinks, at least practically if not officially. Permalinks work up to a week back, then poof.
See below for much much more… and less.
Merry Christmas Inkernet.
Update: Weird — now the poof link appears to work. Here’s a test I just ran on two machines (Macs) through Bloglines on Firefox 1.0:
From Bloglines, the first entry on the 19th:
Works at 10PM Pacific
The last entry on the 18th:
Doesnt.
More to come as the my NYTimes crisis deepens.
More: I’ve tried every entry in my NYTimes Bloglines Business cache from today back. It breaks on the 18th as noted above, then produces random links through to the content with archive abstracts intermingled going back to the 4th of December, where my Bloglines cache for a month view runs out. I’ve tried to rule out the browser (same behavior on Safari as well) and should probably flush the caches to see if a page always resolves once it has done so correctly. But I haven;t tried that, hoping someone can duplicate the problem on their machine, one of the 1,435 subscribers Bloglines reports for the feed. Dave has already questioned my assertion, so I’m hoping he’s right and it’s just me who’s lost in the Bermuda Triangle. Oh yes, I cold rebooted.
Hold the phone. After posting these last URLs, I changed them to links in the post and clicked on them, with successful results. The last link for the 18th still bounces to the abstract page even after I resolved it successfully ffrom the blog post link, so it’s not a cache issue. In fact, for those who use Bloglines, where (I believe) frames are used to display the individual items on the right pane, it appears that the Times doesn’t like these requests coming from that frame. Is this a purposeful issue to prevent Bloglines subscribers from accessing old stories in the Bloglines UI, or just a frames issue, or just a frames issue that might be related to frames-based deep linking? Or none of the above?
For now, I’ve changed the title to Fit, with a ?
