The Independent Blog

Posted by The Independent on December 5th, 2007 in Website

Well we had a meltdown with the website Monday night. I won’t bore with the details but the gist of it is the software we use to publish the site was throwing major errors and databases were corrupted and one midnight phone call later I told the copy desk to leave it and I’d see if I could sort it out in the morning.

It was difficult to fix and I could not get Tuesday’s stories loaded until close to 10am which of course leads to a myriad of emails from readers and coworkers wondering where the news was. I hate it when that happens - the broken site I mean, not the irate readers They have every reason to be irked the website isn’t working.

Thankfully, everything seemed to work properly last night because today’s stories were up when I woke up this morning. So there you have it folks - sometimes things go wrong. With the Internet, there will always be technical glitches. All we can do is fix them as soon as we can.

In fact, here’s something you may not know about the website: Publishing the print stories to the web is a 60-step procedure with the tools we have to use. The site is published in the middle of the night by someone on the copy desk - after they’ve finished everything they need to do to get print done.  So when things go wrong, as they inevitably do, we can’t always fix it until someone can get in there in the morning and monkey with it.