Tuesday, April 14, 2009

The "Eeyore" Mystery Solved

A couple of weeks back some of you may have noticed a very unusual post at EPJ, "eeyore is cute!" said the post.

I was as shocked by the post as you were. I thought for sure I was hacked. It wasn't as malicious as the total wipe out of my site by Obama followers last summer, after I posted some interesting information, but it still forced me to change key passwords.

Turns out a bug was accidentally placed by Blogger. Blogger today writes on the dashboard of bloggers who had the bug placed on their sites:

Some blogs are seeing a new post that says "eeyore is cute!"....During routine testing, a bug caused a small number of FTP blogs to publish a test post. No systems or accounts were hacked. We have corrected the original bug, and are working to remove the test data from the blogs. In the meantime, republishing your FTP blog will also correct the problem. We apologize to those bloggers who were affected - we are looking at mechanisms to prevent similar occurrences in the future.
I went in and corrected it manually as soon as I became aware of it. It sure looked like a hack to me. Not only was the "eeyore is cute!" post put up, but all files were erased made after April 1, which I guess means it was possibly some kind of April Fool's joke. The code for my RSS feeds were also opened, but I didn't notice any changes.

In the future if there ever is a problem with the site, I will update through Twitter to keep everyone posted. To check on emergency posts at Twitter, if you suspect EPJ may be down, just go to twitter.com and enter my username: robertwenzel

Of course, you can also sign up at Twitter to automatically get my Twitter posts.

BTW: The "eeyore" post also solved another mystery,that is, How does Bob Murphy end up posting regularly to his blog, hold down 18,000 consulting gigs and write a new book every other week? The answer turns out that he doesn't sleep. When I logged on that morning there was an email from Bob, I think the email was marked as coming in at 3:00 AM or something and said, "I don't get your eeyore post."

1 comment:

  1. Well I couldn't possibly get to sleep that night, what with your borderline bestiality post.

    ReplyDelete