Arrow-right Camera
The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Huckleberries Online

RSPA: Whattamess; Blogmeister Ryan: We’re Tryin’

RSPA: DFO, your site's a mess this am. I bet it's the Group Health ad. Why does this site and the S-R's main site suck up so much of the user's processing power? Need server or software upgrades? Better coders? The big boys of the blogosphere, the real pros, don't have balky crappy sites like this. I wonder how good your techs/programmers really are sometimes or if they're just tasked with slapping racing stripes on an 87 Ford Escort wagon and pretending it's a Maserati. Don't take this as me just being cantankerous, you're going to lose repeat visitors if your site remains unstable.

Blogmeister Ryan: I love it! "Slapping racing stripes on an 87 Ford Escort wagon and pretending it's a Maserati ..." We usually go with the duct-tape-and-baling-wire analogy, but this one fills the bill just fine too. Print me up a T-shirt. The technology of our site is ancient, by web standards. Incredibly frustrating for Gina and I, as we've tried to push the site into the future without the proper architecture to support it. We've needed server and software upgrades for a long time, and as it happens, yesterday we got final approval for exactly that. So by this fall (if all goes according to plan), we ought to be running on brand-new servers and software that is, actually, one of the Maseratis of development frameworks. ... As it happens, most of the (problems with blogs) these days tend to be ad-related; this morning's error was a simple glitch in the code provided to us by the ad agency.



Huckleberries Online

D.F. Oliveria started Huckleberries Online on Feb. 16, 2004. Oliveria's Sunday print Huckleberries is a past winner of the national Herb Caen Memorial Column contest.