Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Blog.

So I started this thing about a week ago.  I wanted to get a few entries under my belt before I let anyone know about it.

Today at lunch I put up my 4^th and 5^th entries and thought that was a reasonable time to make it a little more public.

So I posted a note on my Linked-In suggesting to people there that they could check it out.  It seemed pretty innocuous since so few people actually read the feed on L-In.

Apparently, however, at some point something I did or didn’t do, unbeknownst to myself, (or potentially unremembered) my Linked-In account got attached to my personal twitter account.   

So it picked up my post and put it to my twitter feed.  It decided, however, that my post was too long and trimmed a bit of it.  Now it is true that my personal twitter account is attached to my facebook feed such that anything I tweet goes straight to my facebook.  So the post was picked up and transferred there.   Any guesses what was trimmed off?  Right, the tail end of my URL for the new blog that I was inviting people to check out.  Within 3 minutes I had three comments to that FB post.  All three commenting about the validity of the URL.  One making comment about the quality of the QA associated with this quality blog.

Now, I posted the blog entry on my lunch at work and sent out the note to linked-in from my phone at the same time.  I couldn’t see things happening on FB because it’s locked down here and I don’t go to see what’s up there.

It’s really a lesson about never making assumptions about the end product of your work product because you aren’t really in control of all interactions.  But from the QA standpoint it also highlights the lesson that you have to be careful, you can’t guarantee what might happen to things.   You can’t always know all the factors and the higher the level of complexity the larger the possibility of problems.   You can’t plan for every contingency, but you have to have a system fault tolerant enough to handle it.  In this case, my FB readers will likely forgive my bad URL and go to the new one that I’ve put up in a comment under the first one.

As a humour aside, I went and removed the connection from Twitter to my Linked-In for that account and will add it for the QAisdoes twitter feed (@qaisdoes).  At the same time I grabbed the post and having deleted the original twitter post, I cut and pasted the same post into a new tweet.  The entire text of the post fits with 2 characters to spare!  Which means that if twitter hadn’t had weird rules about trimming entries from Linked-In, there would have been no problem at all.

Ah well, live and learn.