Earlier this week, I found an issue with the software I was using to manage comments for The Simple Dollar. I deleted a single character in a single line of code, breathed in deep, refreshed the page…
… and 7,000 (!) comments appeared in the moderation queue.
The bug was a simple one. Ordinarily, comments that need to be moderated are assigned a particular number in the database – let’s say it’s a 1. If I approve the comment, the number becomes 0. If I don’t approve it, the comment gets the number 99 and effectively vanishes.
The bug essentially revolved around the fact that some comments for moderation were being assigned the number -1 instead of the number 1. In a code edit, a – sign had been stuck into the code in front of a 1, effectively turning it into a -1. Thus, when I would view the comments that need moderated, I would only see the ones with a 1 and not see the ones with a -1. I’m not sure what percentage of comments this was affecting, but I’d estimate around 25% of them.
Anyway, I’ve got a lot of comments to deal with. I’m going to go through these in batches because it would take several days of nothing but comment moderation to deal with that many comments.
Here are some personal finance articles of interest. This past week, I spent a lot of time reading some lesser-known personal finance blogs and I’ve chose to highlight some of them this week.
Recipe for Survival: 23 Ways Restaurants Save Money This article summarizes very clearly why I don’t like eating out unless we’re eating out someplace quite nice. I simply have much more confidence in the food I cook at home. (@ coupon sherpa)
I don’t want to retire I think the biggest problem for many of us when it comes to talking …