bostonherald.com
"High traffic volumes" again. Who knew Joe Fitzgerald was so popular these days?
So why is bostonherald.com like a good pillow?
It's down.
Dare to complain about how Howie Carr called in a column about how awful the Marathon is? You'll do it on your own site, the Herald tells Tai Irwin, scrubbing its own Web pages clean of the former 'FNX jock's Tai-Rade blog (his blog URL now only brings up "Sorry, no posts matched your criteria").
Free Republic, of all places, has a copy of the offending post, which, OK, takes a dig or two at the Herald ("purchased by over a dozen Bostonians at newsstands"). Scroll down a screen or so.
Via Boston Radio Watch, which posts the e-mail Irwin sent to local media types (scroll down a bit on this page as well).
Teddy Kokoros gets annoyed at the way so many Herald stories online end with a page that has just one sentence on it:
... It seems to me they could just fit the entire article on one page, but they try to spill it over to two pages a lot to increase page hits/add revenue. ...
Ed. page-break note: I work for a trade publication that also breaks its online stories into multiple pages (small example). And we ran into a similar problem as the Herald. Turns out it's fairly tricky to design an algorithm that can deal with all these cases (for example, "If the last page of a story would only have one sentence, just skip it and append that sentence to the page before"). Takes a good programmer, in fact (of which we're lucky to have a bunch), so I suspect what's going on with those annoying one-sentence pages is more an issue of a mediocre algorithm than a desire to increase revenue.
Yesterday, bostonherald.com posted a Red Sox mid-season report that requires 33 clicks to read in its entirety. Today, boston.com responds by whipping out a 63-click Red Sox mid-season report that also lets you click on a mini-poll on each page.
If anybody actually finishes the entire thing, let me know how that finger splint is working out.
Via Dan Kennedy.
Josh Michtom captures a bostonherald.com blurb that either highlights the dangers of content-management systems or some sort of editorial judgment on Antonin Scalia's ass.
On Puritan City, Dan explains how you can tell which Web-server software bostonherald.com uses by looking at the tiny "favicon" symbol you might get next to its URL in your browser.
You know the drill.
Boston Herald managing editor Joe Dwinell has been all over the Entwistle case on his blog - and you should see all the comments he's getting. But he has a request for his fans: let him get some work done.
Joe and I once worked together in the world's smelliest news bureau, but that was a lifetime ago.
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