About a month ago, I noticed a peculiar thing on Hard Fault Life’s homepage:

Everything’s fine except one of the posts is showing up twice! Eh, whatever. I restarted µstack to see if the duplicated post went away, and it did!

But, I checked my blog again today, and the duplicated article was back - the same article was duplicated, I might add.

This shouldn’t even be possible. µstack, my personal blogging platform, is very dumb - too dumb to do something like this. It slurps up markdown files from a single folder, transforms them into HTML, and shoots that out to the user. There is no database where something could get duplicated by accident. The rendered HTML is kept in a hashmap in RAM, so that’s clearly not to blame. I didn’t accidentally duplicate the markdown file, either. I was absolutely baffled until I moused over the links.

The first one linked to:

https://hardfault.life/p/diy-shutter-tester

And the second one linked to:

https://hardfault.life/p/diy-shutter-tester.

Okay, so there’s a funny dot at the end of the URL. I decided to type https://hardfault.life/p/clapper. into my browser. Lo and behold, the page loaded and then there were two entries for the Clapper post on my home page. Bug identified!

Clearly there was a glitch in my code that turns the slug (diy-shutter-tester) into a canonical path (/asdf/posts/diy-shutter-tester.md). I’ve “fixed” this in µstack 0.9.1 by removing all periods from the slug before querying the hashmap. I could have returned a 404 instead, but clearly someone out there is linking to this URL with a dot at the end. I’m a teeny tiny website tucked into the corner of the web and I’d rather not break someone’s link, assuming they’re a real person.

On that note, who the hell is responsible for this? I don’t keep logs far enough back to identify who accidentally put a period at the end of this URL for the first time. In any case, the logs do show that a bunch of crawlers and feed readers have touched it within the last couple weeks, so I think this “keep the link alive” approach is probably for the best.

Also, I see you Claude and GPTBot. I’ll be dealing with you shortly.