The Oregonian: Charity Case?
I was reading The Portland Feed and saw a post awhile ago about how the permalink situation over at O(mygawdIcantbelievethiswebsiteis)Live-basically, there isn’t one, their permalinks suck and apparently they can’t figure out why. Well, David Simmons was able to figure it out without too much trouble. Apparently nobody at OLive cared.
Cut to yesterday, when The Portland Feed had another post about the same thing. Well this time someone at TheO noticed. You will notice that I used permalinks and that they are actually working, so yes, in fact, it CAN be done. You may also notice this from the end of the comment (direct copy paste):
i’m sure we’d welcome volunteer work you’d care to donate.
I commented too and I got a little cranky about it, I admit, but honestly how can they want volunteer work when the solution to their problem has been offered up twice on that blog alone, and I’m presuming most reference books would have some kind of answer as well? I do not doubt that instituting any kind of change on the site is not an easy process, but how hard is it to convince someone to fix something which is broken? If it were a printing press that had a malfunction which prevented it from printing page 4 then it would get fixed right away. In the 21st century, how is a news website any less important?
Enough already: the blogs dissing on traditional news media has got to stop. B.O.R.I.N.G. And as for “Portland Feed”? Please. Someone needs a new hobby. No one cares: blog about something that matters.
I didn’t diss them for their news coverage quality, timeliness, or accuracy. I dissed them for being a for-profit company with a website who wants VOLUNTEER HELP. If you can point out to me where say, Nike or Kaiser Permanente or Fred Meyer wants people to work on their websites as volunteers I will gladly point them out as well.
And in case you hadn’t noticed, “gotta say”, there’s a Suggest A Story link just over to the right there.
I think you’re confusing an anonymous weblog comment by a slightly cranky OregonLive (not Oregonian) employee with Official Policy. I can assure you they’re not looking for volunteer help. The blog CMS is being upgraded, I hear, which would make the hosed-for-non-IE-permalinks question moot. Probably why they’re not going to the trouble to fix it now.
Tonight I wrote a Greasemonkey script to automatically fix their links since they won’t do it themselves. Firefox users can go here to install it:
http://www.anotherblogger.com/2007/02/05/greasemonkey-script-fix-oregon-live-permalinks/