This was curious. It turned out to be caused by ClustrMaps, so I've removed that from the main page.

Is SiteMap still evil?

UPDATE: It seems to have happened to me because our DNS went out. Strangely, I could ping the DNS with 100% return rate, but lookups all failed. I was able to load chizumatic because I had the DNS lookup cached, I think, but looking up ClustrMaps failed, and that resulted in this strange IE error. (Firefox didn't pop up; it just was stuck waiting for a response that never came.)

It took Comcast about an hour to get the DNS working again.

(Please note that this is not a request for advice or suggestions.)

So I went out for a walk. The creek is higher again, and I went down and looked at the dam. The beavers have completely blocked the main channel and raised the spillway there so that it is now dry. As a result the water is now running around it, over the sidewalk, and the water behind the dam is maybe 6 inches higher, which means it's flooding a larger area again.

UPDATE: Late last night I received the following from someone working at ClustrMaps:

(please copy/paste to your site if you want)

Hi-- it wasn't us... really! The DNS failure would have caused the same problem with any other resource needed externally, and you just happened to be pulling in ours.  Our reliability rate is fantastic these days, and I'm wondering if you could kindly edit or 'strike through' the sentence 'caused by ClustrMaps', since, even with your update paragraph, a search engine trawl just now highlighted 'stack overflow caused by ClustrMaps', which is very off-putting to any prospective users!

In case it helps, I've also updated your account to ClustrMaps+ (better zoomed-in continent maps, no ads); you don't need to change the HTML or thumbnail map, which would stay the same).

Many thanks for your consideration!!

It's a bit scary that they noticed so rapidly, and that they thought I was important enough to respond to! Yikes!

This is just an itty bitty anime blog, and it doesn't even get to borrow all the Google cred I built up with USS Clueless, since it's on a different server, at an entirely different URL. (I don't even know how to check that, by the way.)

Regardless, I had already been thinking about removing ClustrMaps from the page, and I don't think I'm going to put it back. But I did want to give them their chance to respond. It would seem that the stack overflow is how IE responds to certain cases of DNS timeout, and it isn't specifically related to ClustrMaps.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Site Stuff at 12:00 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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