Swing your 'scriber round and round!

December 4, 2019

Wish I could understand why I'd say something like 30% to 40% of the time when I go to “https://write.as/", it assumes (what I imagine to be courtesy of some of the page's javascript logic) I want to post as “anonymous” instead of “inquiry”. I mean, the page still thinks I'm logged in, as the pulldown quickly reveals “inquiry”. But having to go through that extra effort to post as “inquiry” is a wee bit annoying.

Man... I really miss some past authors, here.

(“ConZervative” and “Paradise” quickly come to mind.)

I tend to prefer the personal stuff to the informative stuff. While the latter rarely addresses anything I need to understand better, the former draw me into human contexts I can feel literally in proportional to writing skills.

Ooopsie! Looks like either something's wrong with whatever serves up the write.as api, or the api behavior changed, or more stringent creds are needed, or it's been changed to work only for those with a higher subscription plan, (or ???,) as all of a sudden this is happening:

$ curl -k -s -L -o- https://write.as/api/posts/un71wxwyc8ccutzs
$ echo $?
7

$ man curl
...
EXIT CODES
  There  are a bunch of different error codes and their
  corresponding error messages that may appear during
  bad conditions. At the time of this writing, the exit
  codes are:
...
       7      Failed to connect to host.

(NOTE: Article ids (e.g. 'un71wxwyc8ccutzs') obtained by scraping the output of “curl -k -s -L -o- https://inquiry.writeas.com".)

Did my opening my big fat keyboard mouth lead to a bit of, um, “api hardening”?

Please tell me that honesty wasn't the best policy once again on this planet....

Of course, it could also be a temporary-ish blip.

Or the internet's tendency to feature-bait, hook, then demand moolah for what was free.

Or the internet's tendency to “improve” things in ways that somehow feel a lot more like retrograde motion.

Anyway, it's just one of those days where it feels a lot easier to assume the worst.

Oh... wait a second... IT STARTED TO WORK AGAIN! There IS a benevolent deity in write.as after all!