The Drawbacks of Utilization

Back in May, I wrote an article on Utilization as part of my Key Site Concepts series, and while I am still a big proponent of taking advantages of services provided by other sites, I learned a rough lesson this week.

I maintain a personal blog called Further Up and Further In (it's a Chronicles of Narnia reference from The Last Battle in case you were interested). One of the features I have on there is my weekly "most listened" lists for my music. These lists are populated by XML documents provided by Last.FM, and this week they did a major upgrade of their systems and services.

And guess what happened? There was an error with one of the XML documents, and my script that was carefully crafted around them choked. Since I did not build in any way to catch such an exception (nor had I needed one in nearly six months), my site came to a screeching halt when it tried to read from the XML. After more than two days with my blog out of commission (I would have fixed it sooner, but I was busy with work and helping a friend move), Last.FM fixed the XML and my site was back in business.

However, it made me realize the cascading nature of errors when it comes to utilizing the services of those sites. If that service goes down, so does everything that uses it. Because of this, we should always try to build our sites to deal with these failures if at all possible. If you're using a maps service for your church's website, make sure your site can have a map image (or at least just load without the map) if that service goes down or makes an upgrade where the service location changes.

If there's anything worse than out-of-date websites, it's broken websites. Don't let what happened to me happen to you too!