| Truth and Consequences |
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OK, I'm going to come clean on this one. As you're reading this, the site has a couple of
glitches that may affect your viewing experience. I think we've identified them all, but you
never know. Our intent was to install a new version of the site in the off peak hours so as
impact as few people as possible. In a perfect scenario, you install the new code and everything
works flawlessly. Maybe you get a couple of emails from people who say they got bumped off the
system. UPDATE: The SEF issue is resolved. If you encounter any problems, please feel free to let us know. We'll keep this story up through the weekend. This whole process started some time back with a series of objectives. The main focus was on faster loading of pages and improved search. We also wanted to get the site closer to being XHTML compliant. While our page template is XHTML compliant, some of the 3rd party components we use are not. We're still working on this though. Well, all looked good on the test server. As some people may know from testing, it's difficult to get a test environment that is identical to your production environment. In our case, some of the issues had to do with licensing as some code could only be used on www.timeatlas.com, but not on the test domain. This afternoon we ran through our final series of tests that included checking web links. It's amazing just how fast links can go stale. Then again, maybe these links were the result of other people going through similar web site changes. If so, I can empathize. The main problem we have is the URLs. In the previous version, we had what's known as SEF links. The SEF stands for "Search Engine Friendly". Apart from search engines, the links are easier for readers as well. When we turned on the new site, the code for creating these links didn't work. Instead of seeing links that mapped back to the section, you see something like /content/view/106/44/. We expect to get this issue resolved within the next couple of days. In the interim, the content is there, but the links are unintelligible unless you're a computer. This is also impacting the RSS feeds. For the time being, we're not updating the feed, as the article links will change when this gets fixed. We apologize for the inconvenience. |
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| Last Updated ( Friday, 10 December 2004 ) |
