NewsOK speedy again after BCS hangover
At 10:31 a.m. this morning, we received two questions from a NewsOK visitor. Here’s the first part:
do you realize your website is completely unusable today?
Yes – we realized that we were suffering from site performance problems for a significant part of the morning today. It was bad timing, since we were prepared for a massive traffic surge after the Sooners’ loss to Florida last night in the BCS National Championship game.
After a lot of research from our programming, development and server administration teams, we found the culprit … the massive amount of traffic on our main article, coupled with the massive amount of comments made on that article, led to unforeseen overload on our database servers.
Basically, the volume of traffic caused some of our users to experience issues trying to load our Web site. The “nuance” has been adjusted. And the extremely occasional unforeseen problem is a byproduct of being the largest Web site in Oklahoma that is growing at a remarkable rate.
(And when I write “occasional unforeseen problem,” I mean it. Our site-disruption rate would rank well with any site in the world.)
We don’t want it to happen again and are taking additional steps to find unforeseen issues.
And now for the trick question – the second part of our visitor’s question.
how can a news organization be this inept?
Um … nice try. I’ll have to re-phrase before I can answer.
Seriously, I don’t blame this person for being frustrated. I’m certain many other visitors were equally frustrated. And they had every right to be.
But trust me when I say that I doubt your frustration matched our own as we investigated the issue. We pride ourselves on delivering information to the world when you want it.
You demand it. We deliver it. That’s the deal.
That is our goal on a lazy July day, and it’s our goal on a busy post-national championship day. It will be our goal tomorrow.
Regardless, please try us again. I promise that all the content is still there now if you couldn’t get it before – as are the 600-plus reader comments on the primary OU-Florida article. Sorry you couldn’t get it when you demanded it.
Buying the Sam Bradford flip
We received this question today:
Forgive me for being untechnical. Howsomever, can you tell me where to go on your site to find the ‘Bradford flip’ photographic series? I would like to purchase at least one of them and would like to see what is available. Beaucoups thanks.
I had a similar question last month, and the answer is the same, but I’ll provide a bit more detail this time.
You can purchase a “piece of history” when you buy a re-print of The Oklahoman’s front page of the sports section. It just so happens that we had four images of the flip – shot by photographer Chris Landsberger – on that cover.
I purchased one for my 8-year-old for Christmas. It is now framed and hanging in his room. (It’s always fun when your growing son has his first sports hero).
Bottom line: That re-print cover can be a big hit.
The reason we offer re-prints is in the fine print of the press credentials we get each year. We can’t sell the images from the NCAA game action as individual photos. We are, however, legally allowed to sell images of The Oklahoman’s pages.
My site loads faster now!
The most consistent comment we’ve heard from the public is that our new Web site is cleaner and easier to navigate. We’re happy to hear that, because that was the ultimate goal of the resedign.
Another consistent comment we’ve heard is about the load time of the site.
Indeed, the site does load faster than our previous version. That is happening because the programming staff and designing staff spent weeks cleaning up and improving code under the covers to make your computer load our site faster. They also configured the servers and placed images on new servers to improve the load time of the site.
I’m no expert on that stuff, but I know when my favorite Web site works well – and this one does. It’s just another example of the development team making things happen behind the scenes to help our news and information shine.
Blog page
We’ve heard from people wondering where our main page for the blogs have gone. We are working on that. We knew we were launching without that page; the design for that page is still being finalized. However, each of our active blogs is still available through the various sections of the site that they relate to – and most can be found through our Voices page.
We get lots of of traffic on our blogs. Traffic for our blogs has tripled in the past few months, but we haven’t seen a great increase on the main blogs page. Our conclusion: people are getting to our blogs from many different areas of the Web, but not necessarily the main blogs page, so we made it a secondary priority for launch.
We will get that page up soon. Stay tuned.
