What happened was that they had a server problem and lost a bunch of posts. I read their site using RSS through Google Reader, and one of the "features" of Google Reader is that it remembers posts that it has seen before in the feed -- even if those posts are no longer in the feed. So the take-away from this is: Google Reader remembers posts which are deleted.
This could be considered an epic backup backup strategy, in that your reader pool is now acting as a backup of your blog posts -- but it means if you retract something, the retraction doesn't make it to Google Reader. I have observed this before, where people have published posts and then removed them (either because they wanted to delay the posting or because they had second thoughts) but I still got to read them.
Moral of the story: think carefully before you hit
Er, no, I mean the moral of this story is: your backups are good, right?
