I came home this evening after a particularly dreadful day at work, got onto the computer to blog some quicklinks, and discovered that several of the items on my serendipity quicklinks blog were gone. Vanished. Poof.

After the day I’d had, my first visceral reaction was to curse and moan. I posted a note on the usergroup about the oddity of the missing entries, and then went looking to see if I could recover them elsewhere–or at least determine the extent of the problem.

Thanks to Bloglines (I love me some Bloglines), which seems to cache old entries from the RSS feeds you access with it, I was able to pull up all of my serendipity entries. Comparing this to the current state of the blog, I was able to determine that I’d lost twelve items (after an initial miscalculation that had me thinking I’d lost 41, which started me swearing again), and precisely which twelve they were.

In the meantime, though, I’d already started receiving personal emails from the Dude development team, and over the course of the next few minutes they were able to track down the bug and fix it so that additional entries wouldn’t vanish. We also discovered that the entries only vanished when someone else had “duded” them (normally this just makes an additional copy) to their own blog; since this meant that all the ones that had vanished from mine still were available in the system, and I already had determined which they were, it was pretty easy to find them and dude them back to serendipity.

So, as upset as I was initially to see my links gone, I really have to give a lot of credit to the Dude folks for their incredibly prompt response (after regular business hours) and sense of humor. Thanks, guys.