Scott Francis, the Web team’s programmer, has been hard at work repairing parts of yakimaherald.com that should work, but doesn’t. In other words - bug hunting.

To catch folks up on our latest news, yakimaherald.com runs on Depot Central, a ruby on rails system to publish the news online. Scott built Depot Central.

Before we launched the new site, his programming of Depot Central has mostly been in the background on a test server. It’s unavailable to the public, so the Web team can test, evaluate and modify the system so it operates smoothly. Yet bugs are unavoidable. One perspective that is relatively commonplace in the tech industry is that testing within a closed system can never ensure bug free products. That reason is why we have the disclaimer at the head of yakimaherald.com. If you encounter an error, let us know so we can fix it.

Since we launched, several of these bugs have been reported and fixed. Others will be squashed over the next few weeks and months. The short answer is, what we build and test privately sometimes does not work after it is deployed to the public, forcing us to fix it or disband it.

Here’s a short list of things that have been repaired or modified on yakimaherald.com since we launched.

• Front page redux (several times - and ongoing)
• ‘E-mail the story’ link
• Several section pages did not display correctly (sports, opinion, letters to the editor…)
• Massaging the control system (how we manage the stories)
• Temporarily diverting sections to the old server, such as obits, until we get them migrated over to the new system.
• Getting the ad system to work better site wide.

More bug stuff later!

- TJ

For anyone who casually reads yakimaherald.com, you might have noticed several things going on with our site, some good, some not so good.

Over the past 3 months or so we’ve changed our advertising service a few times, added new code and subtracted others from the main site, and are creating new ways to tell stories online with video — all the while building a new CMS (content management system) to publish the news.

Currently, we use a rather pieced together grouping of technology to process and publish news stories for the Web site. The new publishing system (CMS) will use fewer processes and enable us to manage and publish online in a better way.

The new system, known to the Web team as Depot Central, has been an ongoing project for nearly two years. All of the work, from planning to programming will be launched in it’s raw form next week. More on this in a future post…

Experiencing Web news hiccups?

If you’ve noticed slow loading time, graphic or design elements being in the wrong place, or the site being down for a moment, etc… well, you are not alone.

One major hiccup has been the amount of time it has taken the public to load yakimaherald.com. After a few weeks of poking at the site, and a couple days of downright frustration, we think the major load problems have been eliminated.

If you want, please comment, or e-mail us about your load time experiences before Feb. 26 and the present.

Regarding problems with pages appearing funny when you look at them, etc… As we prepare for the new CMS, we are trying out new design and code formats. Most of them work the first time, others require a bit of tinkering to make the site display correctly on most Web browser configurations.

These changes make the site a more ‘organic’ site, than a static, flat Web site that rarely changes. One of the biggest reasons for building the new CMS is to provide flexibility for displaying and publishing the news.

Many Web techies call flexible sites ‘dynamic’, but for me, what yakimaherald.com is becoming is more organic than anything. I think that way because it’s changing in ways the public may not see in one day, unless it experiences a few growing pains (like a bit of misplaced code that breaks the front page,) but is recognizable over time.

To me, ‘organic’ also means that it’s home grown. It has a few difficult days, or weeks as it matures and develops, but it’s made by folks here in the Valley to reflect the community it serves. At least that’s how I like to think about it.

To wrap this up — I will have a lot to say about these new projects, as they come rushing forward to public use. My hope is that the changeover into our new publishing platform has few bumps on its way forward, but we will see. Bear with us and continue watching as yakimaherald.com experiences a major growth spurt in the coming days.

-TJ

Well over the past few days Scott has taken on the task of making a few fixes and improvements to our Opinion section.

As we work on improving some of our features, inevitably those changes alter how other things work in different sections.

One such fix came up this week when we were notified by a few of our readers that the print and email functions were not working in the Opinion pages. Scott has fixed that problem, but it highlights a greater need that we need you, the reader, to provide us feedback on what you experience on yakimaherald.com. Good or bad, the more we know, the better we can provide the news, entertainment, photography, video and blogs that we hope to supply.

I strongly encourage everyone to let us know what works and what doesn’t on the Web site - so feel free to contact us through commenting on this blog, phoning or emailing us through the ‘contact us’ page.

We are looking forward to improving the site, and hopefully not breaking too many things along the way!

-TJ

The yakimaherald.com Web site was up and down most of Saturday, providing inconsistent service to our readers. We are looking into what systems failed and how we can prevent future problems.
I encourage our readers to please contact us if you are having problems accessing yakimaherald.com or any Yakima Herald-Republic Web sites (like this one) so we can get things fixed.
Thank you!
-TJ

Update(10:52 a.m.): yakimaherald.com is back up. Scott will be writing an explanation post shortly.

Morning everyone, currently (10 a.m.) yakimaherald.com is down. We are working to re-establish it’s connection to the Internet.

Once we get the Web site back up, I will let you know here. Thank you for your patience.

-TJ

Most Internet Explorer errors and bugs with the new navigation bar have been resolved as of 4:30 today. We will continue to check how it work on other browsers this coming week and add them to the list below. If the navigation bar is not loading or functioning in your Web browser please make a comment below so we can resolve the issue. Thanks again!

We are currently (3:15 p.m. Friday) checking for errors and bugs with the new navigation bar. During the next two hours we will be making sure it works in the most common browsers.

As of 4:30 p.m. yakimaherald.com:

Internet Explorer 6: working

Internet Explorer 7: working

Firefox 2+: working

Safari: working

A couple javascript errors are popping up, but is not causing a problem. Progress - looking into it.

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I will update this as we make sure yakimaherald.com is compliant within the above browsers.
-TJ