Warning, todays post is a rant about the vagaries of modern day social media technology. Really just need to get it off my chest.  Please accept my apologies if this causes your eyes to glaze over.

I noticed this morning my Dlvr.it  WordPress RSS feed automation has not been working since May 20th.  Neither was my Zapier automation which I use to post my feed to the Kerrzone facebook page.

Troubleshooting Yuck

I had an alert from Zapier last week but after spending several hours trying to figure out the problem I gave up.  Dlvr.it sent no error message so I figured the LinkedIn feed was still active and that is the one I really care about.

This morning I thought I would quickly check if my Zapier feed had miraculously fixed itself.  It had not and just in case I checked Dlvr.it and found the feed also was not working.

Strange Ambivalence

I have mixed feelings about trouble shooting technology issues.  I like the challenge and certainly feel good when I figure it out, however, I am never happy when things mysteriously stop working.

For well oiled organizations (public and private) documentation is a system and application documentation is a requirement.  For my home grown Kerrzone tech, not so much. Which of course makes troubleshooting even more fun.

Cutting to the Chase

For some unknown reason (I had made no changes) traffic to my WordPress blog was blocked from outside my network.  So, Dlvr.it and Zapier could not connect.

Within my own LAN I had no connection issues.  When it finally nally dawned on me some sort of weird partial Natty address blocking was going on I put the server into the DMZ and problem was solved.

Even weirder, I took the server out of the DMZ and the problem did not return.  Chalk up another one for the mysterious electronic gremlins..