Melissa Wantz: Notes from West Egg

Tomorrow is the big day. Our news site launches for the first time with real content: articles, video, photos, polls, Twitter, Facebook, commenting, article ratings, etc… Yesterday I worked from 7:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. and today has been the same. It’s been a race to the finish with stories coming in at the last second and photos frantically being shot, edited and uploaded. The kids operate in the “nearly now” and it’s nearly killing me. My prefrontal cortex is screaming: why can’t you guys do things ahead of time, meet deadlines, plan for the unexpected? Their prefrontal cortexes, which are not completely wired, are asking where the cake is and who’s on Facebook right now.

The kids want to put the site up online at midnight, which currently is 1 hour and 15 minutes away. So this evening we have been working on it from our respective houses, trying to edit stories and fix little flaws from the back end of the site (the non-public end), and now the entire thing has crashed. Turns out the hosting company is doing some server changes RIGHT NOW. Luckily, I got a prompt response to the email and the owner says it will be back up soon, but still… what are the odds of this happening right now? We are one hour from our stated launch time (stated on our Facebook page, at least), we are 12 hours from the entire school watching it after morning announcements and we have… nothing.

Just one more thing about technology that I need to get over: the inability to actually control anything! You can plan and plan and build and build, but you can’t seem to count on the technology to work all the time.

I’m trying to roll with it…

…with joomla’s strange behavior that I can’t seem to get a handle on (why does inserting a “read more” tab into a story wreck the frames of the entire section page? why can’t photos be resized in the image editor?)

…with the hack job that was done to the hosting company last Friday, rendering the site useless for a day. Is that something that will happen again? Should I move our site?

…with the way my Google Docs system of editing turned into a disaster (hint: have the kids upload stories to one place and let the editors come there; sharing stories in Google via emails just confuses everyone because nobody really knows “where” the stories are at any one time)

…with the way Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer all display the website differently and how that makes no sense to me and I can’t control it or make the site look good on all three at the same time

… and now with the site I’ve been working on for seven solid months being just hours away from its reveal and the server (from Canada!) going down for the first time in my experience. Should I move the site? Of course, today I just upgraded our account to get more bandwidth and storage space. Naturally.

I never thought I’d say this, but I think printing a paper — even by hand — might just be easier and more sane.