New games every week!
Alert, Alert!! Blog
18th March 2021
Alan, the last remaining RSS Feed user, sends us a late night warning..

-=-=-

At 2:30am I heard my email bleep, and rolled over in bed to check my phone.
Old articles in the rss feed use this url format. They still work fine.
agameaweek.com/?id=9980

New articles use this url format. Regardless of the number after the
/goto/, they all navigate to the same page.
agameaweek.com/goto/10011


Aaargh! A Break in the Site!!
I shot up, grabbed the MacBook and got to work.

The error was in the .htaccess file which, incidentally, MacOS hides because.. that's useful.. :/
I opened up FileZilla and accessed the file through it's file browser, which ignores all the standard rules, and just shows a good old list of files..

Hunting for the GOTO line in the htaccess file, I noticed that the regex was specifically looking for IDs with 1 to 4 numbers in them.
At some point in the past few days (March 14th) I crossed that boundary, and managed to hit 5 digit IDs for the items on the site. OMG!!

This one simple change broke the RSS feeds, and since we still have one user who uses them, it was something that needed fixing.

A single numerical change, the .htaccess file got re-uploaded, and then I went back to bed.

The simple fixes are the best fixes!
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