In the process of enabling caching in DWiki, I managed to illustrate the importance of thorough testing by failing to properly cache the real titles of entries and then not noticing, because that the Atom feeds stayed the same was the one thing I didn't test. (I carefully and somewhat obsessively tested that the rendering of all of the other pages did stay the same. I even have that automated.)

This caused the syndication feeds for WanderingThoughts to revert to plain filename based titles for eight hours or so, until I noticed (yet another example of ReadYourFeed; I did eventually, but not fast enough). So everyone just saw a gratuitous feed change or two, which I apologize for.

The effects on the LiveJournal feed were a little bit more dramatic. Despite the only change to the feed being the titles, LiveJournal decided to revive two entries from March 7th and 8th and arbitrarily give them today's date, effectively regurgitating stale content on the readers of the LiveJournal feed. This irritates me, but probably not as much as it irritates you.

(I call it arbitrarily because the entries have proper (old) timestamps in the Atom feed, and they're not at the top of the Atom feed either. LiveJournal's syndication stuff mystifies me on a regular basis. Hopefully it is not doing something as crazy as using the entry title as its internal identifier.)

The incident has also pointed out some problems in my caching implementation. In particular, I need to version the cached data so that a new DWiki version using a cache with old data silently ignores it instead of exploding spectacularly. (Alternately I need a more robust way of storing the data, because sooner or later I may forget to bump the data version number during an upgrade and then have the kabooms anyways.)

Caches are hard. Let's go shopping for faster CPUs.