I may owe an apology to any of you that received a rash of posts from this blog to their RSS reader this weekend.  I am so sorry.

On Friday I was performing routine maintenance and adding a plugin…and the blog crashed (being sent into an non-ending loop).  It crashed so hard that I couldn’t login and undo what I had done.  (note:  apparently the Twitter plugin I use to autopost to my @patent Twitter account didn’t like the Google Reader “Shared Items” plugin).

I became so desperate to break the loop it was in that I went as far as to attempt to delete the plugins in question (deleting a plugin without deactivating it first can cause its own set of issues).   However, that plan failed when the plugins refused to delete (I kept getting a “permission denied” error).  My wonderful host (hostingmatters.com) explained to me as “This is a common byproduct of php-based applications, as some files/directories are owned by the php user rather than the account user.”  Note to self…Wordpress’ 2.7 automatic plugin installer (for my installation) makes one unable to delete the files/folders via FTP later.

This morning I was able to get HostingMatters to delete the files.

Upon logging in, I noticed that I had 15,000 posts (14,500 of them over the weekend).  ARGH.  My stomach turned, thinking that all of my readers would suddenly have 14,500 duplicate posts in their RSS aggregator.

Thanks to Matt Buchanan, I was able to delete the duplicate posts.  Thanks Matt.  Hopefully, my database purge didn’t break anything else (if you see something broken, please do drop me a line (snipper@gmail.com)).

I just checked Google Reader, dreading the worst, and see that “”The Invent Blog :: Stephen M. Nipper’s Patent Blog” has no unread items.”  Whew.

I sure hope none of your RSS aggregators were bombed.  Again, sorry if they were.

Related posts:

1. Blog moving…pardon the dust
2. USPTO Director Kappos’ Blog