Okay, there’s no way to break this news without making myself look like a dumbass, so I’ll just own it.
For the past week or so, Canadian Atheist has been sorta-kinda broken. The site itself never went down—you could still read all the articles and stuff—but it was impossible to add new articles, or even to email us.
Luckily this didn’t actually prevent any articles from going live, because the breakage happened after last week’s Update. And I noticed it (mere hours!) before the next article in Scott Jacobsen’s 2000 Years of Disbelief series went live.
However, we may have lost emails, and possibly messages sent from the contact form. So if you sent anything over the past week, please resend it.
How did this happen?
Well, there’s no point in getting into the technical details, but basically, I am constantly working toward making Canadian Atheist entirely automated… or at least as near to it as possible. That way, should anything ever happen to me, CA can still run on cruise control for at least a little while until someone else is ready to fully take over as managing editor. (And, when they do, a lot of the drudge work tasks of running the site will be automated for them.)
Normally when I develop some new system, I test it rigorously on dummy servers before deploying it on the actual, live, CA server. This time, though, it was such a little thing—a trivial side-system not really connected to any of the main systems—that I got lazy and just deployed it right away. Because I’m a bad-ass hacker who codes without a safety net and all.
Well… yeah… no.
Anywho, everything’s fixed now. And I learned my lesson. At least until the next time my hubris gets the better of me.