The custom footer module is truly one of the saviors of Office Live. It provides a way to add pure code to an OL page without the javascript/iframe shenanigans of the html module which often causes problems.

But it has some quirks which are worth understanding. One of them may be surfacing more recently as a result of sites reverting to a 4th level domain, after the recent spate of custom domain expirations. I ran into this quirk while installing an application on a site I manage.

For some reason, the custom footers on page templates installed fine but couldn't be edited. The arcane error message referenced an "unexpected = when a ; was expected on line 1 position 410". No idea what that meant, so did a quick search on the OL community, and came up with this thread by SamsBook (aka OL Sam). He had the same problem and discovered it was due to an ampersand in his site footer element which was throwing an error in the custom footer.

I knew there were originally no ampersands in the footer links on the site I was working on, but when I checked the links there, I noticed one of them had been replaced by a long OL url which sure enough included an ampersand.

Evidently, when we allowed this particular site's custom domain to expire, OL automatically replaced the links which of course no longer referenced pages on the site. Sam didn't make that connection perhaps because his situation was different, but just like him, as soon as we removed the OL supplied link, the footers all worked again as they should.

So the moral of the story is-if your domain expires, and you see an error that references an unexpected character, take a look at the links in your footer area. Thanks to Sam, another MS mystery solved!