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Disappearing Posts - The Mystery Continues

The problem with disappearing posts - blog posts that display with no content (except the post title - examine the photo below, please) visible, was first reported several weeks ago. Today, I felt the need to update my post about this issue. Having updated the post, I refreshed to test, and poetic justice here, saw a surprise.


OK, enough! How can I help people, if the content which I use to help isn't visible?



And as random as the problem seems to be, you never know if any one of your posts is currently white screened. With any blog of any size, you could have one or more posts white screened at any time, and never know about it.

And with caching latency, some of your readers at any time, might have a fresh copy of your post, provided by Blogger immediately before the problem hit your post. Only those with no copy of the post, or a stale copy of the post, will have to retrieve the problem post. So not all of your readers will see the problem.

And this problem continues, still.

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Comments

Marf said…
I know, I'm still having this problem as well. It's easy enough to get the posts back, but they disappear again...
Annie said…
Ditto here. So, I went to see what Nitecruzr had to say about this mystery and found, momentarily, "the white screen of death."

Glad to see your post back. And mine too.
I'm using Blogger to run a webcomic -- one strip per post -- and as it is a serial, we need all posts of every age constantly available. But we've hit this problem with vanishing posts -- yesterday, about every 25th post was missing. Again, easy to fix, but we can't keep checking everything every day. Most other webcomics are using WordPress which has a ComicPress package specifically for the purpose. We really want to stay with Blogger as long as possible, but they need to sort things like this out.

If it makes any difference, I think the very first time this happened was the day the "Monetize with Adsense Between Posts" selection was added. I wasn't using the feature, but maybe that's involved somehow.
Chris said…
I haven't noticed any disruption in your feed. Do you use Feedburner? You could always set up another page on your site using the HTML widget (BuzzBoost), and link to that page: "Can't see the content? Click here." Since your feed is okay, I would think the Feedburner widget would be okay, too.
With reference to the earlier google.friendconnect javascript anomaly that took the place of the post slot in all my affected posts, I realized it may have something to do with the Followers-gadget that has now been automatically upgraded for all users to include Google Friend Connect. If you're having problems with blank post slots in pages, try removing the Followers gadget if the other workarounds don't work. (And report back.)
Marf said…
@ Mr. Ananda: I've never used the Followers gadget and I've got this disappearing posts problem.
Nitecruzr said…
Marf,

Do you ever see a disappearing post after you approve a comment?

Ananda,

No the HTML snippet that references "google.friendconnect" is not part of the Friend Connect or Following gadget. It's garbage, that doesn't show up in a properly published blog.

The next time this pops up, I'll extract the exact code, and put it into another post. Post a comment here, if you want to hasten that.
Marf said…
@ Chuck: I let the comments go live the moment they are posted. In fact, I don't even use a captcha image.

I have an email sent to me whenever a comment is posted, and I moderate then. I don't get spam all that often though.
Nitecruzr said…
Marf,

So have you every checked any of your posts just after a comment is published to that post? When do you typically observe the disappearing posts problem?
Marf said…
@ Chuck: I typically observe the problem right after I've just made a post, or when I get up in the morning and someone's emailed me telling me my site's blank.

I'm in the Alaska time zone, and I get up kinda late as it is. So my "morning" is often already afternoon on the East coast.

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