Far too knackered to type, so here are my rambling thoughts on the day via Seesmic:

doomed.jpg
An e-mail arrives from one Private Fraser of the Home Blogging Guard:

TheOpsMgr's DivestmentWatch blog has been taken down, seemingly at the behest of RBI management.
 
I've written about it and posted the cached copy

And so he has.
Upgrade Desk MessMy, what an interesting few hours it's been. We went live with MT4 circa 11am this morning. While, on the whole, its been plain sailing, a couple of issues have cropped up. We've been getting internal server errors in the user interface, which Nicholas has tracked down to issues with FastCGI and the mt.cgi script. Thus we've disabled FastCGi on the servers handling the posting interface, and are hoping that the problem will go away.

We're also having to set up some URL rewriting to handle elements of the change from Windows to Linux that mean case-sensitivity in URLs is an issue.

Oh, and one of our bloggers has used the problems to make a point. Transparency's good, right?


Fire Alarm, originally uploaded by Adam Tinworth.

And just as we were about to go live...

Liverpool Daily Post logo
The journalists at the Liverpool Daily Post are extra-busy today - because they're liveblogging the production of the paper.

The insights into the pressured environment of a daily publication are suprisingly gripping, so far. (I've never worked on anything more frequent than a weekly.) However, the thing I'm finding most entertaining is comparing and contrasting deputy editor Alison Gow's official post and her personal one. 


Building on the success of our local elections coverage, when our exclusive live blog gave online readers the opportunity to interact in real time with our journalists at counts across Merseyside and receive instant information, the Daily Post is running a live blog from 7am today until the presses roll during the early hours of Wednesday morning.
Staff will update the live blog throughout the day and everyone who logs on will be invited to comment on the work as it unfolds, ask questions or share information with the editorial team.

Commenter IconsI've been doing a little playing around with the back-end of this blog. 

Comments are now displayed with little profile pictures to go with them. You can choose your pic by selecting the "Edit Profile" option, when you're logged in. And yes, that does mean that there are now commenter profile pages on here, into which you can enter as much, or as little, information as you want. (Here's mine, by way of example) 

If you're not using any of the registration forms available on OM&HB, then the system will fall back on the Gravatar user pic service. If you register with them, your pic should automatically appear here. 

Thumbnail image for Reed Elsevier LogoAh, the good people (and by good people, I mean Laura) at Journalism.co.uk seem to be intent on making our lives here...interesting. Today, Laura's posted on the blog pointing out that Divestment Watch, the blog run by a member of the TotalJobs team charting the progress of Reed Elsevier's divestment of RBI, has vanished. I'm not clear at this point on why that should be, as RBI here in Sutton was happy to tolerate its existence, to the best of my knowledge

And last week, Laura's account of publishing director Jim Muttram's speech at the PPA's conference focused on Jim's suggestion that journalists could, in future, be paid partially based on reaching (or exceeding) defined traffic targets. Jim has posted his own response to the story on his blog, Inflection Point

Personally, I think some move in that direction is inevitable, over time. 
MT4 logo
Well, it looks like the long wait is finally over. The training is complete, the load testing done, and the templates upgraded. If all things go according to plan, we'll be running our blogs on Movable Type 4 from tomorrow afternoon.

Wish us luck...

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