OK, so a number of you may have noticed some major gumming up of PlanetMySQL over the last week or so. Some feeds were not appearing at all, and yet other feeds were inserting entries that had nothing to do with MySQL — entries that previously never made it into the PlanetMySQL database. Here's the story on what happened, how I screwed everything up, and how I figured out what was going on...
The Backstory
All of the problems stemmed from a well-intentioned effort on my part to figure out why certain feeds weren't being properly aggregated by the PlanetMySQL feed reader. Arjen wrote the PlanetMySQL feed reader originally, back in 2005, and it has performed admirably up until this point. The feed reader uses the Magpie RSS library for its grunt work, and has a filtering system that allows the Planet administrators to assign a regular expression filter to a specific feed so that entries not related to MySQL don't get inserted into …
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