Saturday, November 22, 2003
“No, I didn’t say that, I said something else”
You know of how politicians and celebrities frequently retract their earlier statements? Looks like our newspapers do it too sometimes:
This particular news item from the Indian Express has been edited almost every day since it first appeared a few days ago. In one earlier revision, Abhijit Kale’s name was entirely replaced with an anonymous “top cricketer”.
The changes were captured by NetNewsWire, my RSS aggregator, using Aaron Swartz's HTML Diff.
This particular news item from the Indian Express has been edited almost every day since it first appeared a few days ago. In one earlier revision, Abhijit Kale’s name was entirely replaced with an anonymous “top cricketer”.
The changes were captured by NetNewsWire, my RSS aggregator, using Aaron Swartz's HTML Diff.
mannu — Nov 22, 2003 4:18:41 PM — # ↩
Anyway, this is something new I've learnt. Thanks!
frozenaftermath — Nov 23, 2003 5:56:24 AM — # ↩
Besides, there is not a lot you can do with one average copy editor who mans the newsdesk and this is one of the very rare mainstream newspapers in India that still use 486DX boxes on the print desk.
The amount of trouble that had to be dealt with in getting even the RSS feeds to be made live was bad enough. Imagine the fun when you can have when the online ops GM and the tech head ask you "WTF is an RSS feed?" when you first float tbe baloon.
Considering all that, be thankful for small mercies :)
Kiran Jonnalagadda — Nov 23, 2003 6:40:18 AM — # ↩
And the Yahoo news feeds are even more fun: every story changes every few hours. I had to unsubscribe all my Yahoo feeds because the old stories would be marked as new every day, and worse, the same story appeared slightly rewritten in multiple feeds on different days.
It was as if they had no publishing process at all: the reporter posts raw notes live and every time the editor hits Ctrl+S to see what it looks like in a browser, the whole world sees it too.
(Yes, I'm aware Yahoo doesn't have reporters or editors; all news is syndicated.)
Kiran Jonnalagadda — Nov 23, 2003 7:01:37 AM — # ↩
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/09/13/Deltas
frozenaftermath — Nov 23, 2003 2:47:37 PM — # ↩
After poking around with CMS design for a while now (both from end-user perspective and the designer's perspective), my view of what is to be done ideally has changed a lot. Earlier, I used to be all for the CMS that had all the lifting power of a beast, one that is can be customised to no end depending on how smart a user you are.
That works fine only in theory, problem number one being that it immediately increases the learning curve and makes the whole framework dependent on the people who run it. The database and the records by nature are neutral contextually, but when the display finally comes into the picture, it completely takes on the characteristics of the person who calls the shots. Believe me, it is very common to have the nature of inter-record relationships to change when people in charge too change. And that is not good at all.
From there we go to the point mentioned in the link where he says that you can publish new revisions to get around the problem. That still would leave two different takes of the story, leaving the spin there for everyone to see. A certain degree of correction is a part of any publishing process and from the dimwits that I see on most online news desks these days, if they are allowed to have the degree of freedom to enter revisions as new stories, you are going to have hell to pay.
If you have worked the news wires, you would know that every story gets updated through time with different takes and factual corrections, after a while your DB is going to be so full of redundant entries that you will be driven to tears. Case in point is the place where I work now, they gave the Word interface to the CMS the option of putting page breaks in the stories, then all hell broke loose, some would give it after the second para, some would give it after the 5th and ultimately it was locked down at the CMS-end with auto page breaks inserted according to the paragraph number.
Most days it can really drive one nuts to lock down problems and solve it, because the content people would give specs that tech would not be able to do much about and once it goes live there is no rollback possible, you are bounced between both the parties trying to figure out who gave the requirement in the first place. But, it is always safe to lock down end-user options from the design perspective if you want to remain sane than expect content teams to lock down their usage of features. One example of that is the CMS that I mentioned with the Word interface, the XML and the HTML it outputs sucks and a 3 year old kid can do better CSS than the software will ever do, but this way the developers can work with a finite set of things that are inserted into the CMS.
In the end it is all about which poison pill you take, but it is poison all the same.
Kiran Jonnalagadda — Nov 23, 2003 12:09:42 PM — # ↩
frozenaftermath — Nov 23, 2003 2:17:32 PM — # ↩
Same is the case at IE, something called as EDC, the WAN is on an ancient version of Netware.
News business online is selling snake oil, with a lot of idiots telling other idiots what to do and the idiot on top sanctions it all. It is quite interesting really if you can take a detached perspective.
BTW, you seem to be familiar with the Express group's setup.
Was working there till about a month back, three long hard years of trying to get people who have no idea of tech to see sense, it worked every now and then. Now I have moved on to another larger disaster, the 'other' place you mentioned that uses the MS DOS based system.
Care to share details?
I would not be too sure about a blog discussion, shoot it over email and will answer as much as I can. It is codelust([at])myrealbox.com. I think we have contacted each other via mail before.
madhav — Nov 24, 2003 5:41:05 AM — # ↩
Whats a good aggregator on windows ? Freeware ?
frozenaftermath — Nov 24, 2003 10:57:37 AM — # ↩
http://www.wildgrape.net is my fav Windows aggregator, but it needs the 21 MB .Net framework.
madhav — Nov 25, 2003 3:45:57 AM — # ↩
Thanks ! Am trying it out right now.