503 error when trying to update page?

  • Unknown's avatar
    jsrgrdn · Member ·

    This only seems to affect the “Books” page of my blog:

    http://jointstereotype.wordpress.com/books/

    I’ve noticed over the last few months that updating the page has been taking an unusually long time. About half the time, on clicking “Update,” the page will refresh properly after maybe 30 seconds, and the other half I’ll get a 503 error page. I went through the HTML code, and I don’t *think* there’s anything wrong – but perhaps I’m missing something? FYI, I’m able to update other pages and posts just fine.

    If it’s any help, I’ve tried clearing my browser’s entire history / cache / cookies, etc, and the problem seems to come back sporadically. I’m using Firefox 10, though this problem has occurred in times past, when I was using FF 8 and 9, I believe. my operating system is Windows 7 64-bit.

    Any advice you can give would be much appreciated. Thanks. :)
    Blog url: http://jointstereotype.wordpress.com/

  • Unknown's avatar
    helper-ringostarr · Member ·

    The only HTML markup issue there is that you have some h2 tags with an ID that starts with an underscore which isn’t valid (must start with a letter)- but if this is what causes 503 then we’re having serious problems here :)

    Do you get that error all the time?
    I was able to just update it without a problem.

  • Unknown's avatar
    jsrgrdn · Member ·

    Thanks for taking a look. :)

    No, it’s somewhat sporadic – sometimes I’ll be able to update the page without a problem, and sometimes it will give me a 503. Regardless, the page consistently takes longer to refresh than any of my blog’s other pages after clicking “Update.”

    I’ll go through and try renaming the h2 IDs to omit the underscores – I wasn’t aware that they aren’t valid. May or may not improve the situation, but I suppose it’s good form. :p

  • Unknown's avatar
    evarlese · Member ·

    When you see the 503 error, are you having trouble connecting to other sites? Or only that page?

    The next time it happens, could you try running a trace route to http://wordpress.com/ ?

    To do a traceroute on Windows:

    1. Go to Start → Run.
    2. Type “cmd” and press Enter.
    3. Type in tracert YOUR_DOMAIN and press Enter.
    4. We are looking for anything that shows a large number of timeouts. If you see anything like that, copy and paste the results into a reply here.

    * Replace YOUR_DOMAIN with your wordpress.com domain name.

    To do a traceroute on a Mac:

    1. Go to Applications → Utilities → Network Utility.
    2. Click the Traceroute option at the top.
    3. Type in the domain that is not working for you and hit Enter.
    4. Look for anything that shows a large number of timeouts. If you see anything like that, copy and paste the results into a reply.

    You can email us with the results. Can you also let us know what country you’re blogging from?

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