mea culpa

My sincerest apologies to those on Facebook and Twitter who were flooded by old posts from the #Archives. For the past day, it seems like a WordPress plugin, Tweet Old Post, went crazy and began posting every few seconds vice every 20 hours as configured.

Reliable @abaggy and @cocobeanheart told me about the aggressiveness of my archive posts, and I was totally clueless what they were talking about. Then I saw my timeline filled with Archive posts. Yikes!

Sadly, I think my server was so busy serving up these posts/tweets that I couldn’t access it. I went into my Twitter account to unauthorize the plugin, and that seemed to give my server some breathing room. From the WP admin page, I also unauthorized the plugin from Twitter and then deactivated it.

So what happened? I’m not sure. There are several recent turn of events that probably contributed to this craziness. To help figure out my sites’s (in)stability, I provisioned a virtual private server for my MySQL backend. This process took little over a day before all my various, scattered databases were migrated to my new virtual server. Last night, I noticed I was getting a database connection error across all my sites. All configurations looked right but apparently wasn’t. I generated a trouble ticket for this incident and went to bed.

This morning I got a reply from the Help Desk saying everything looked okay. And yes it was. All my sites were working once again. Weird. But also over this time frame, the WP plugin Tweet Old Post started doing its thing, really, really well. I didn’t notice all the tweets every few minutes originating from my account. Again, sorry for flooding your Twitter and Facebook timelines with all these updates.

So, it might be that the migration of my databases looked like new DB entries. Therefore Tweet Old Post activated and started tweeting out all these “new” old posts and ran crazy trying to catch up. Up to this point Tweet Old Post worked as expected, so I’m not knocking this plugin. This is probably an anomaly triggered by unique technical changes to my WP and MySQL backend.

Again, I apologize to all who got too much pulp from my site. Sadly, I’ll have to endure the Twitter followers I lost due to this outbreak and all the spambots I picked up.