From about 7 a.m. to 10:50 a.m., the main Yakima Herald-Republic Web site was unavailable. Vaguely ominous messages such as “Service Temporarily Unavailable” or “Rails application failed to start properly” greeted our readers. (Warning: We’re about to get geeky with our technical descriptions.) (more…)

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

For anyone who read my post about bug fixing shortly after launching the new navigation bar; Scott has eliminated several javascript errors. So far it looks like they have been eliminated, but (more…)

Hopefully change helps you find the stories you want to read on yakimaherald.com.

If you haven’t noticed already, yakimaherald.com has been going through a few changes recently. The two most recent changes have been how you find stories and the user interface (logo, colors, placement of content).

There have been other projects the Web guys have been taking on over the last two months to improve yakimaherald.com, however, for the time being, I am going to write about the two latest changes.

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Navigation System

Yakimaherald.com no longer has a navigation bar on the top and left side of the Web site. (see examples marked in red)

We have moved many of the links into one place in the top navigation bar for a number of reasons; the first to help readers find what they are looking for on yakimaherald.com. The new navigation bar contains most of the old links to pages readers have come to expect, such as the sports page, or today’s news page.

- More pages, more stories -
On closer inspection of the navigation bar, readers will find new links, new pages, and a way to read stories that were published that week in (more…)

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

Welcome to yakimaherald.com’s blog - ‘The 404′ - where the guys at your favorite local dot com provide the public behind-the-scenes information about yakimaherald.com, yakimablogs.com, playdateyakima.com and other Yakima Herald-Republic Internet properties.

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The geeks behind the wheel:

Matt - Online Director -
Matt is responsible for the overall direction of the department and the site. He spends much of his time determining strategic goals, selecting vendors, and working with advertisers and other Yakima Herald-Republic staff. Matt has a BFA in Graphic Design and has been working in the online newspaper world for 10 years now. (Note from TJ: Matt’s cool factor has been raised by a factor of +2)

TJ - Web Producer -
I publish story updates, build graphics, write some code, shoot some photos and video, record audio, build blogs (like this one), and other various things. In other words, I stay busy.

Scott - Web Developer -
Scott programs and maintains the various technologies that drive the Web site, and usually is kept far away from graphic design.

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What is The 404?

The term ‘404′ is a tech reference to a common error message when a Web page is not available.

“The 404 or Not Found error message is an HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server but either the server could not find what was requested, or it was configured not to fulfill the request and not reveal the reason why.” - from Wikipedia

Since the Web folks work behind the scenes at yakimaherald.com, it made sense to name the public blog after a message explaining that something does not exist.

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How to use this blog
The Web guys will comment on what is going on here at yakimaherald.com. We encourage you to use the ‘Let me hear your take, comment on this’ section to provide us feedback and questions about your experiences with yakimaherald.com.

- TJ