Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Charlottesville, VA, USA. more »
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8 replies on “It’s Friday already?”
Your “on, off, on-again” comment is curious. When did Harris ever announce that he was running?
Unfortunately, the new Daily Progress website has resulted in their archives being lost. This is precisely why that’s a bad thing, since Bob Gibson covered every step of this process. Paul’s been planning a candidacy for years, making that increasingly public over the past year. Then he sent an e-mail to supporters about a month ago saying he’d decided not to do it. Then he sent another e-mail a few days later saying he’d changed his mind, and now he was in the running. And now he’s not running.
Of course, he’s never announced that he’s running in the standing up on a podium and saying “I’m announcing,” in the same sense that many presidential candidates didn’t “announce” during this cycle until after they’d been campaigning for months and raised millions of dollars. But, of course, that’s just goofy semantics on their part.
Waldo, are any of the articles on the wayback machine?
How short-sighted of them.
I don’t know — the pages are gone from Google now, so I don’t know what URLs to check against archive.org. The new Daily Progress CMS appears to be a big improvement, in many regards, but I think in sum it’s a big step back. I have years of links on cvillenews.com that broke, and they’re never going to work again. Media General just doesn’t place a premium on this sort of thing. The shame is that it’s online newspaper archives that are now our primary method of holding politicians accountable. I don’t mean Paul Harris — how many times he’s gone back and forth don’t really matter — but folks in office now, whose most public record of their promises and past actions have, at least in Charlottesville, just evaporated.
One would hope they are smarter than this, and that it has nothing to do with political reasons.
It doesn’t seem mean-spirited, but are they really this stupid over there? Why don’t they place a value on this? (I don’t expect you to answer ;))
Benjamin Franklin and his followers, me included, are rolling our eyes at this one.
This makes me want to back up the entire Danville R&B website lol.
From my understanding of the situation, this is a result of a poor grasp of the importance of technology and website standards on the part of Media General management. Just picture this conversation:
Manager: Install this new CMS on your newspaper’s site.
Web guy: OK. But this is a totally new CMS — how do we get the data from the old one to the new one?
M: Who cares? We’re a newspaper. People want today’s news. Nobody cares about four year old news.
W: But there are thousands of links to our articles from thousands of websites.
M: How much work will go into moving everything over and remapping the URLs?
W: I really can’t say. Weeks, maybe.
M: Hell no. Drop all that old stuff.
There’s nothing malicious about it. It’s simply a lack of understanding that the paper of record is the one that’s archived by Google.
Waldo, I think a lot of this Harris in and out stuff is still on my blog. Even though I’m no longer at the Progress, a little bit of my blogDNA lives on there. :) http://www.mydailyprogress.com/index.php/bobgibson
Your “on, off, on-again” comment is curious. When did Harris ever announce that he was running?
Unfortunately, the new Daily Progress website has resulted in their archives being lost. This is precisely why that’s a bad thing, since Bob Gibson covered every step of this process. Paul’s been planning a candidacy for years, making that increasingly public over the past year. Then he sent an e-mail to supporters about a month ago saying he’d decided not to do it. Then he sent another e-mail a few days later saying he’d changed his mind, and now he was in the running. And now he’s not running.
Of course, he’s never announced that he’s running in the standing up on a podium and saying “I’m announcing,” in the same sense that many presidential candidates didn’t “announce” during this cycle until after they’d been campaigning for months and raised millions of dollars. But, of course, that’s just goofy semantics on their part.
Waldo, are any of the articles on the wayback machine?
How short-sighted of them.
I don’t know — the pages are gone from Google now, so I don’t know what URLs to check against archive.org. The new Daily Progress CMS appears to be a big improvement, in many regards, but I think in sum it’s a big step back. I have years of links on cvillenews.com that broke, and they’re never going to work again. Media General just doesn’t place a premium on this sort of thing. The shame is that it’s online newspaper archives that are now our primary method of holding politicians accountable. I don’t mean Paul Harris — how many times he’s gone back and forth don’t really matter — but folks in office now, whose most public record of their promises and past actions have, at least in Charlottesville, just evaporated.
One would hope they are smarter than this, and that it has nothing to do with political reasons.
It doesn’t seem mean-spirited, but are they really this stupid over there? Why don’t they place a value on this? (I don’t expect you to answer ;))
Benjamin Franklin and his followers, me included, are rolling our eyes at this one.
This makes me want to back up the entire Danville R&B website lol.
From my understanding of the situation, this is a result of a poor grasp of the importance of technology and website standards on the part of Media General management. Just picture this conversation:
Manager: Install this new CMS on your newspaper’s site.
Web guy: OK. But this is a totally new CMS — how do we get the data from the old one to the new one?
M: Who cares? We’re a newspaper. People want today’s news. Nobody cares about four year old news.
W: But there are thousands of links to our articles from thousands of websites.
M: How much work will go into moving everything over and remapping the URLs?
W: I really can’t say. Weeks, maybe.
M: Hell no. Drop all that old stuff.
There’s nothing malicious about it. It’s simply a lack of understanding that the paper of record is the one that’s archived by Google.
Waldo, I think a lot of this Harris in and out stuff is still on my blog. Even though I’m no longer at the Progress, a little bit of my blogDNA lives on there. :)
http://www.mydailyprogress.com/index.php/bobgibson