Let me just say Wednesday was a day from hell.
Not most of the day of course. The beginning of my day was actually rather nice. I moseyed into the newsroom at about 9 a.m., finished an article, prepared for a meeting with President Armstrong, had said meeting with President Armstrong, went to class where we discussed Andy Warhol and Plato and finally returned to the newsroom once again to chat for a couple of minutes about random things going on that day.
Then 3 p.m. hit, and it all went crazy.
In order I: left my money up in my apartment, realized I hadn’t eaten at all, walked to apartment, realized I left keycard in apartment, realized no roommates were home to let me in, got temporary keycard, ate, was late for class as a result, got into the newsroom, edited a few stories and then WordPress shuts down.
Out of all of these, the most disasterous was the latter.
Our entire system of copy editing relies on WordPress (our Internet server, through which we bring you the site you are reading this on). Authors post their stories to it; copy editors read the stories and edit on it; and section editors pull the stories from it to put on our printed pages. So needless to say, when it goes down, pardon my french but, shit happens.
The biggest problem was, because we couldn’t access WordPress, we couldn’t access any of our stories. This meant that after the obligatory half hour of waiting around to see if the site would magically come back up, we had to try to get the stories from alternate means. Stories that were written in their entirety on WordPress were lost for the night, but luckily, some had been emailed to editors before posting.
So the editors pasted the un-edited text from these emails onto their pages, and we had to start all over again at production night step one — copy editing.
To further complicate things, we were not working on one issue, but two — one of which consisted of 24 pages of (mostly) previously-run content. That’s our Open House edition, where we like to re-run all of our best stories from the year to help all those possible Cal Poly freshmen decide to come here.
In the past, the way we access content we’ve run before is by looking it up on our website to see what date it ran, and then copying and pasting from the pages of that day. Except now we couldn’t see what dates things were, so we were basically just blindly searching through the stacks and stacks of papers (98 issues this year) in the newsroom to figure out story dates.
The final issue (I promise I won’t whine for too much longer) was that even after we copy edited the pages, we had no way to put those articles onto the website again. As a result, you may have noticed that none of today’s articles appeared online until about 5:30 p.m. or so, when an amazing copy editor by the name of Erica Husting began to re-type and edit the stories online and publish them.
In short, yesterday’s technical difficulties seemed insurmountable as they happened, but the great people who were working last night pulled it all together and made up for it. So this is a really a thanks to all of them. Thank you, and let’s hope it never happens again. (As I’ve been working tonight, it’s already shut down three times, so hope may not be on our side)