NobleDead.org Broken?

Recently many users of Blogger (with or without their own domain name) found that articles/posts over a week old with internal links to their own site’s static “pages” were all broken. Visitors clicking one of those links were getting “404 Page Not Found” errors. The same is happening for any other site worldwide that has linked to some static pages on a Blogger site from elsewhere. NobleDead.org was affected as well for just its “Tales” and “Books” pages… and J.C. burned even more time trying to figure it out.

All articles/news from now on will have links that work for the “Tales” and “Books” pages. But if you go to an older article/post from our site, its internal links to those pages will not work. You can still find those needed pages through our site’s main menu.

So what happened? No one is fully certain, but as said it happened because of another Google code push without adequate notification to all of its systems’ users. And no one from Google has so far talked with anyone raising this issue on the support forums.

Originally, when a static page is created and given a title on Blogger, that title was used to create the virtual “file” name for the page as seen in its URL and used for linking. Later, site owners could edit that page’s title more appropriately and the virtual file name would remain unaffected. Not any more, and anyone who did change a page’s content suddenly found the virtual file name for that page was changed to match whatever title had been added later. Any further editing of the page title also caused further changes to the virtual file name… and hence the full URL by which links are created to that page. Endless cycles of broken links are still continuing even now.

Much as J.C. does not need any more on his plate cutting into writing, he is looking into a more permanent fix. This is not the first time Google has done something like this, and it won’t be the last. NobleDead.org will never go down or disappear, but we ask for your patience for a little while. Please report any new or strange difficulty you have on our site via the “Contact” page while we look for an ultimate solution to all of this great Gobbler… um, we mean Google(r)… nonsense.