Posting issue resolved

I'm happy to report that a rather longstanding issue with posting in Pukka has been resolved -- on the del.icio.us side of things. That is to say, the version of Pukka that you are using right now will now work properly with no action required on your part.

I had been getting some reports from users of periods of inability to post for a few months now, but only very occasionally. Users would get a message like this when trying to post:

This would happen many times in a row in a short period, but then eventually go away after a few minutes. It turns out that the resolution may have been due to users finally getting a different del.icio.us backend server, one without the problem, but without knowing otherwise on the frontend of things.

Unfortunately, the condition that was producing the posting problem was indistinguishable at a network level from being offline when trying to post (which would obviously fail). So it was difficult to determine if this was a sporadic networking problem on the user side or something deeper. However, in the last week or so, the frequency of folks seeing this problem went up, so I began to hand out some debugging builds of Pukka that could supply me with more information about what exactly was happening.

Once I had this info, I posted to the del.icio.us developer Yahoo! group about the problem and within a day or two, they were able to track it down to a problem in their system.

So in review, I'm happy that this is resolved, but by all means, please do let me know if you continue to see it, especially if you are using Ma.gnolia or another non-del.icio.us service as I have never had a report of a problem under those conditions.

I'd also like to extend an apology to users of Pukka who have been dealing with this for a couple months. As I've mentioned before, it can be difficult when core functionality of your application relies on a third-party, network-based service, so it's important that if you are having a problem that seems to be related to the service to let the developer know so that they can get to the bottom of things as quickly as possible. More votes means more time with my eyes on the problem and hopefully a speedy resolution!