Frontier Scare #34

This is one reason Manila/Frontier scares me:

Can’t figure out why my XML button can’t generate clean rss code, so I get some help from David who well-meaningly (is that word?) turns me on to a little tool called Tidy that is supposed to clean up the code and make it work ok. Takes about five e-mails back and forth before my slow on server issues brain figures out what to do with the files and my server guy puts them where they are supposed to be. Then? All of a sudden, I can’t edit posts. My students can’t even get to the edit box in their posts. Things seem to be breaking right and left, and since it’s the last week of class and my kids would be up it without a paddle if their Web logs went down, I decide to punt. Tell Ed the server guy to reload everything off the backup tapes from last night even though it means I’m gonna lose a couple hours of responses that I wrote to kids this morning. Thank goodness, it’s now fixed.

Both Ed the server guy and I walk on tippy toes when it comes to Frontier. The gems issue from a few months back really scared us…so much so that he backs up the whole shebang every night now. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great when it’s working, and it’s working 99% of the time, but it does make it difficult to try new things with it.

The kicker is that I just went in and edited the posts that were kicking out the rss feed and now it looks ok. And I even made it work with Amphetadesk, which I am playing around with in terms of setting up feeds from my kids Web logs. But does anyone know how to limit the number of posts Amphetadesk shows? Small steps.