Micro-disaster plan

Livemarks became slow yesterday for an hour or so. That meant I had to update my database by trying to connect and download links manually. I didn't think of the possibility that my script might not connect but it's important to plan ahead when you're using a webservice.

You've got to think, what happens if it's not available for an hour, day, or week. What does your site look like then? Turns out my trend sweet trend displayed its header only...no links, no trends, nothing.

Today, I fixed it by displaying a message that livemarks was down and showing how many hours the info is delayed. I'll have to work on the scraping script since running it manually seemed to work with a 4-5 minute time for curl to get the page.