Benny Ling’s Bling

Intriguing indeed.

These things all seem to start with Twitter, don’t they? In this case, this tweet pointed me to a link – which promptly 404′d on me. “Address Not Found”, said Firefox.

Hmm. I thought nothing of it until this morning, when yet another tweet came in. I tried the link contained within again, and, surprise surprise, another 404, with exactly the same error message. Now, I was curious. Why was I getting 404s? I tried the excellent website DownForEveryoneOrJustMe.com, and even that said noisypoppy.net was down.

As a preliminary step, I tried it on my iPhone over the 3G network. Funnily enough, it loaded fine there – however, still no joy on iPhone or Mac via Wi-Fi. To me, this said something about DNS.

Next, I tried the good old proxy way: proxy.org, and then any one from the list – lo and behold, noisypoppy.net actually worked. I was able to browse and interact with the website in a normal way – via proxy.

By this time I was convinced it was something to do with DNS. So off to OpenDNS.org – where I then plugged in the requisite IPs into my Mac’s DNS entires (after the Internode ones on my router). I try and load up noisypoppy, and what do you know, it works perfectly. Curiouser and curiouser…

I managed to subscribe to the RSS feed (so I don’t have to go and manually check the website), but now when I go and try and read any of the articles from NetNewsWire, it still manages to 404 on me..

Why won’t things just work? And here I was, thinking the internet was downright infallible…

If you think you’ve got a solution for me to try (or think I’ve missed something), shout out in comments.