zero point nine

Easy Mistake

Posted on: April 12, 2007 - 3:43 pm

I was experimenting with a script to display recent comments, as seen on loads of blogs. Not for this blog, which is a comment desert, but for a music magazine I’m working on.

Anyway, it was a simple script that used Magpie and the Wordpress Comments RSS feed and it worked quite well on my own machine. So I figured I would upload it to the live/demo site I was using. It didn’t work, but it was late so I figured I would leave it as is and come back to it later.

Bit of background, when designing templates for Wordpress, I am lazy and use the Default Kubrick as a basic framework. Kubric has a custom 404 template. Mistake was putting the Recent Comments section in the Footer of said theme… The footer that was shared across all pages in the site… Including the Custom 404 page!

I’m not sure exactly what happened next, the intricacies of HTTP being beyond me, but I have been wondering what would happen if the Recent Comments script, for example, could not find a file it was requesting and received a 404 instead with the same script in the footer, which could not find the file and received a 404. You get the picture.

What I do know is that the next day I had exceeded my monthly bandwidth limit on my server. 1.8GB! All on 404 Requests. 1.8! Yes sir, I’m very stupid.

I took everything down very quickly and have been twiddling my thumbs for a month.

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