Another Glitch In The Matrix

07:00 Wednesday, 12 November 2025
Current Wx: Temp: 31.8°F Pressure: 1007hPa Humidity: 74% Wind: 13.87mph
Words: 607

Not very often, but from time to time I encounter some strange behaviors in Tinderbox. I've been wresting with one yesterday and today. It may have been going on for some time, but I haven't done a more thorough investigation for reasons that I'll explain in a moment.

I added the On This Day in the marmot feature some time ago. Well, I can tell you exactly, I think. Looking at the Created attribute for the Agent that collects posts written on this day over the years shows that it was created on 1 January 2025. I like the feature because it reminds me of things, and sometimes serves as a bit of inspiration.

The Agent that creates On This Day looks at the PublicationDate attribute, and gathers all the notes (posts) written on that particular day regardless of the year. Publication Date is a User attribute, so I can edit it at any time. Sometimes I'll begin a post on one day, but not finish I until the next. Seldom happens, but if it does I change the PublicationDate so the post gets properly sorted in the monthly archive container.

I have to look at On This Day every day, because a few years ago I floundered around in the marmot and changed some of the export settings, which results in posts appearing with no paragraph breaks and no markup. You may have seen one of those, but probably not because no one has ever mentioned such a thing to me.

Yesterday I looked at what On This Day had collected, and there was a Thanksgiving post. That seemed weird. Further investigation revealed that a number of posts had had their PublicationDate attributes changed. So I exposed their Created dates in the Displayed Attributes portion of the post. Those too were changed and matched the PublicationDate changes.

What's odd about that is Created is a System Attribute, and short of going into the XML of the document itself, not able to be changed.

So I looked at the archived page for November 2023 and saw the posts and permalinks (created from PublicationDate) were all in the correct chronological order. The Thanksgiving post appeared on 23 November 2023, as expected.

Normally, I would rely on Created as the canonical date and time the note was created, but here was evidence that it had been altered for a number of notes in November 2023, and I cannot fathom how such a change might have occurred.

Today's On This Day showed similar corruption, with the difference between actual date and time of publication and what the Tinderbox file was showing being one week and five hours for at least the posts written on 12 November 2023. A quick glance at the some upcoming posts shows a different offset. (Edit: The delta may not have been one week and five hours. I'd been editing PublicationDate and may have made a typo. This time stuff really messes with my head anyway.)

So far, it seems that this hiccup only appears in the November 2023 archive, but I'm alerted to it now. I may have missed it before, and On This Day is an ephemeral page, it's not archived, so previous glitches went unnoticed.

Update: Don't know why I didn't check the other posts, but this corruption appears in other years as well. Everywhere? I guess I need to see if there's anywhere it doesn't appear.

Sigh.

It's not a difficult problem to correct, but I can't automate it. I have to view the canonical dates recorded in the published web pages, and then correct them in the Tinderbox file.

Oy! 🤬

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