While I was on vacation last week there was a Sciencetext glitch. I’d scheduled a couple of posts for you, but their permalinks failed. So, unless you were reading the RSS you probably only saw a 404 error when you tried to visit the links. This would have been a problem for anyone finding the page (indeed any page) through a search or if you came from the shortened link on Twitter.

For which apologies.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, last time though, I was not on vacation so was able to fix the problem of the disappearing WordPress code. It seems…but I’m not yet sure, that when one uses WordPress automatic upgrade (which I’d done just before my vacation) and then auto post that somehow the permalinks settings on the server (held in .htaccess) are removed. Why and how I don’t know. The site was working perfectly the day before I left, but seemed to be broken from the Tuesday when an auto post would have run. That said, traffic was halved on the Monday, so maybe it’s not quite so simple as I think.

Anyway, WordPress has again upgraded from 2.8.3 to 2.8.4 and I’m scheduling this post as a test. If it breaks, then I’ll know that the upgrade may be to blame. Perhaps it’s a conflict with a plugin that I use only on this site, because the upgrades and scheduled posts have not broken any of my other blogs.

If anyone has any insights into this issue, please let me know. It’s very frustrating and the week-long outage meant a whole bunch of posts were returning 404 errors to Google and other spiders and so have lead to unfortunate ranking problems, although traffic is almost back to normal levels now.