Good Intentions Gone Bad
Some of you might have known a problem with the site earlier, and I apologize. It’s been fixed. The only side-effect will be the LiveJournal feed will have an entry pointing to a bad URL. It should eventually add a new entry with the correct URL. Probably around the time this explanation goes through.
I currently block certain referers from coming into the site as a response to what’s known as referer spam. I have a specific list of previously received spam from my personal website I use. You can see the list here. If you scroll through, you’ll see the word ‘insurance’ is one of the block terms. This is because a lot of scammers are out there trying to sell faulty annuities and other insurance you don’t need and they feel this is a great way to advertise. I disagree, hence the blocking.
WordPress, our content manager, automatically creates easy to read page “slugs” for our articles. These are based off the article title. For example, the post for this article automatically defaults to “good-intentions-gone-bad”. The post for my renter’s insurance article automatically defaulted to “the-overlooked-insurance-renters”. See the word “insurance” in there? Well, this caused a cascade effect. Once you were in the article, you were suddenly referred by the article, which has a no-no in its URL. This caused things like the style sheet and images to not load, so people saw a blank white page with text. It also caused problems if you tried to click on any links to navigate elsewhere on the site.
I fixed this by modifying the slug to read “ins” instead of “insurance”. Lesson learned.
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