RSS Feeds: On Blog Drive-Bys, DNS Propagation and More
At about 2 am today, local time, I switched the name servers back to my web host after being changed by the registrar to a parking page. Since DNS takes up to 72 hours to propagate worldwide, it will be around 2 am on May 31st before I can be absolutely sure the changes are in place. Although there are still some things happening behind the scenes to disrupt things, I plan to continue with my blog drive-bys tomorrow.
DNS propagation is strange. In most places in the US, my name server changes took effect in less than two hours. In the Asian countries such as China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and Taiwan, the changes took more than 8 hours. I'm sure there are places where the changes still haven't shown up. Several times today, while editing and trying to write (when our power wasn't cut off), my domain came up as nonexistent. I thought it was merely a local phenomena, but when I went to resync my feeds at FeedBurner, FeedBurner couldn't find my domain either.
I mentioned in my Blog Drive Bys for 2007-05-27 that I was starting to go through my neighborhood at BlogCatalog for blogs that I haven't really visited yet. I just realized about an hour ago that I have another good source: My post comments. The comment editor in the administrative center of WordPress will allow me to browse and find every URL used by readers who made a comment. I think my post comments will be my next source after I'm finished with BlogCatalog. I'll just start from the beginning, in May of last year, and work my way forward.
An incident occurred two nights ago, in the creek next to my house. Two teenaged couples were caught having sex, in the creek and in some strange positions. The area was dark, but it just happened to be right next to my neighbor's house. She came out because of all the noise and chased them off. One of my relatives remarked that he wished he had a video camera at the time (he saw a lot of it and this happened at like 3 am in the morning). My son, being the inquisitive type, asked me if that would be considered an invasion of privacy. We had a long discussion and it gave me some great ideas for a future article. That's all I'll write about it right now so you can look forward to it later, maybe as late as tomorrow.
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Peter, was right that this is a really interesting post.
For DNS entries there is a setting called TTL, time to live. This decides how long a resolver is allowed to cache the entry, and hence it decides how long it takes to change an entry.
By default this is one day, but it can be longer or shorter. Typically, when you plan to make some changes you should shorten this to 1 hour so the switch can be made fast.
Of course, depending on how DNS is set up at your hosting provider, you may not be able to access this setting easily, but there is probably some expert mode where you can do this. Just something to think of for next time.
I did set it for an hour. It didn't help. Not over here.
Interesting. If you set it correctly and well ahead of time before you made the change, that should have worked. I'm curiouse to why it didn't. I'll have to do some investigation (i.e. call my friend who knows everything).