Today, L’Express.mu has been launched and it is positioned as a new product by La Sentinelle where people have the possibility to interact and comment on news items.
Unfortunately L’Express.mu is not working well (and this is a major understatement.)
It seems to me that the web application has been written from scratch instead of being based on something proven (either Open Source or not.) The problem seems to be connection-related i.e. the database server cannot accept any new connection presumably because the application has a simple two-tier architecture and it has not been tested properly when under heavy load.
When I taught my Software Architecture MSc course last year, this is something I spent a lot of time on: scalability is not something that can be tackled as an afterthought. If the application is not built with scalability in mind (by using a proper N-tiered architecture with a well-designed business layer) then there is no way it can become scalable without a partial rewrite.
Incidentally, the website runs on Windows 2003 Server and uses SQL Server 2005.
By the way, what is:
catch (Exception ex)
{
  throw ex;
}
supposed to mean?
The “paper” newspaper
In parallel with this new product, the normal (paper) newspaper is available at a new URL:Â www.lexpress-newspaper.com. Unfortunately, the technical team has decided to use a Flash application to display the newspaper. I wonder why? This makes referencing and quoting very difficult. Furthermore, Flash and Google are not really good friends… I would say that putting a newspaper online and making its content non-discoverable through Google is bizarre.
By the way, what is “Le site est mieux vu avec Internet Explorer et une résolution 1024 x 768.” supposed to mean? Is this a copy-paste from a 1998 website? Things have changed since 1998. In 2008, website creators are supposed to write:
“We comply with W3C standards like HTML and CSS and, consequently, you can use pretty much anything to access our website (like your computer, your mobile phone, your PDA, your coffee machine, etc.)”
L’Express has gone Web 0.2 :P
It’s a big FAIL for whoever designed that new site. & not to mention that the flash app is massive CPU hog…
Check out the comments: http://lexpress.mu/News/%601-Blog-L-histoire-d-une-naissance.html
Wow!
& then I saw this on: http://lexpress.mu/News/blogs.html
What the hell is that?
Googling & I found this: http://blogs.cricinfo.com/pakspin/archives/about_pak_spin/
‘Nuff said… I leave everyone to find more “Easter eggs.” :)
Some people still lives in Ice Age.
maybe they think they dun need referencing :P
“Le site est mieux vu avec Internet Explorer et une résolution 1024 x 768”
This is just plain stupid or pure arrogance…It just says to the visitor : Use IE or fuck off.
Now i woudn’t call that a user friendly website…They didnt even specify which IE to use, 6.0 or 7.0 or should any IE do the job?
pfff
Guess they’re better off selling papers on the street corner…
I checked out the site on firefox 2.0 n the first fing i saw :
Problem callage partout!!! Bien vilain lol!!
A website like that woud not even reach our beta server where i work…
and Big Surprise : the company who designed this website is an indian one based in New Delhi…
et moi qui pensait qu’ils sont des génies ces indiens!!
I have been following the site over the week-end and i must say that what they have opted to use is really not to the standards, basically lexpress wants to compete with defi media new site which runs well and loads quick!
They could have opted for vivi cms and use Ipaper for the paper reading site
Indeed I got this :-)
Line 462: //==============================Get Code for Resent Comments———–//
Line 463:
Line 464: string catg = Session[“cat”].ToString();
Line 465: DataSet dslog = new DataSet();
Line 466: dslog = log.getrecent_post(story_id, catg, mid);
[NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.]
News_fullnews.Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e) in e:\inetpub\wwwroot\lexpress\Story\fullnews.aspx.cs:464
System.Web.Util.CalliHelper.EventArgFunctionCaller(IntPtr fp, Object o, Object t, EventArgs e) +15
System.Web.Util.CalliEventHandlerDelegateProxy.Callback(Object sender, EventArgs e) +33
System.Web.UI.Control.OnLoad(EventArgs e) +99
System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() +47
System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain(Boolean includeStagesBeforeAsyncPoint, Boolean includeStagesAfterAsyncPoint) +1436
debug on and getting your db password displayed out to hello world :p that’s pretty much… :p the consequence of either “a boss who wants things to be done QUICK without listening to developers” OR “developers who are actually… by the book :p”
no flames intended … as i guess shit happens
the most lolific part of all was when the db password was out for everyone :p nice alphanumeric with special chars password.. really hard to crack..LOL…
First, for the few times I have viewed the site, it has performed very well. Maybe you caught them at a bad time :-)
It looks like there are two versions of the home page: one accessible at /Default.aspx, and another at /Default2.aspx. Which leads me to believe that the content management system is still unde development.
Regarding the error, it is as the message says: SQL Server has not been set up to accept connections. It is not a scalability issue, but most likely due to someone tweaking SQL Server settings in the production environment.
Related to the error message, the “debug” setting should have been disabled to prevent the risk of having the error message expose code that hackers could exploit.
Finally, this is utterly bad code:
catch (Exception ex)
{
throw ex;
}
It’s catching an exception and re-throwing it. One of the precepts of exception-handling is that a piece of code should not catch exceptions that it cannot handle, which is the exact opposite of what the above is doing. But, that is not the worst thing; at least the exception is being rethrown and can be handled somewhere else. The really bad thing is that by rethrowing exceptions in this way, one loses the stacktrace and will find it even more difficult to debug the code. Say, the error actually occurred a couple of lines above this “catch” statement. Normally, the CLR would report the exact occurrence of the error at that location, but with the above code. the CLR will report the error has being thrown from the “catch” block. Talking about fun for the developer debugging this!
BTW, if there are people from L’Express reading this, I can sort this shit for the right price :-)
Eddy.
Oh, well… Fuck ’em for choosing an indian company to do their crap site instead of a mauritian company. So much for patriotism at the leading national paper :-) Can’t think of anything more appropriate to say other than “bon marche coute cher”!
Eddy.
@Vishal –
[“Le site est mieux vu avec Internet Explorer et une résolution 1024 x 768″
This is just plain stupid or pure arrogance…It just says to the visitor : Use IE or fuck off.]
Maybe your french has gone rusty, but to me the notice looks like a mere suggestion to use IE and not an obligation.
Eddy.
SQL Server has not been set up to accept connections.
I would say its because the database is on anther server and the latter only allows specific IPs to connect to it. And the IP of the server holding all the ASP.NET files is not on that list.
About the IE thingy, that’s because Indian companies just love Microsoft products. They almost always develop their websites based on IE.
:p underestimating mauritians :p
alali la zot inn gagne zot bezE.
overestimating windows
alali la zot inn gagne zot bezE :p
yuuhuu
ps. am on top of the “most prolific commentators” list :D
I would say that’s the perfect example of an education based on paper and marks and not knowledge and passion :p.
+$3|v3n
The new L’express site is a right mess! However, there is a dose of originality – every time I get a different ASP error.
It looks like the the web development team rushed and did a botched job in order to meet deadlines and costs.
If they wanted to embrace Web 2.0, Drupal or any other decent CMS would have been been better here! While Drupal already has so many modules available, you can write your own modules and develop your own themes.
You can always develop your own CMS but if you are not good at it, you are going to end up with a bloodied face.
No need to blame the Indians here.. as in any country, I am sure that you get a broad range of companies with varying prices. If you go with the cheapest one, don’t expect miracles!
Hi Jevin,
You have to ask yourself why was SQL Server configured to reject connections. What happened? Yes, terrible performance issues because of a lack of scalability. And why are web applications not scalable? Because of a bad architecture (i.e. every aspx page opening a connection to the database for example…)
“You have to ask yourself why was SQL Server configured to reject connections.”
As far as I know, they do this to prevent unauthorized connections. (you know, the “you cant connect, you cant hack it” thing)
“No need to blame the Indians here.. as in any country, I am sure that you get a broad range of companies with varying prices. If you go with the cheapest one, don’t expect miracles!”
Maybe they didn’t go with the cheapest one. :)
Wasn’t lexpress.mu in PHP before? Changing from PHP to ASP.NET is a tricky move.
I’m not comparing the 2 languages… But think of the cost and all that. They had to change servers, most probably, and they had to retrain their developers. Anyway, I’m pretty sure they took all this into consideration.
i personally don’t find their new site appealing at all! A Mauritian company to cast away local brains for such a tacky outcome…what a waste of money!
@Ajay – You get a different error each time because the code is probably being worked directly from production.
I do not think this can be considered a scalability issue. One starts looking at scalability if the design and implementation are correct, but the deployment has reached the limit of the architecture. I do not think that L’Express is that popular as to hog a server even running both IIS and SQL Server.
Instead, what we have here is a case of bad coding. To me, it looks more and more like connections are being opened for every request. That would not be bad if the connections were closed promptly. However, the coders may be relying on that to happen when the CLR calls SqlConnection.Finalize, which is like playing IIS russian roulette since Finalize() calls are not guaranteed to happen at specific times.
What is definite, however, is that it is bad case of poor coding.
Eddy.
@Eddy : My point is that u dun say fings like that to your client. Not nowadays anyway!! Its like going 10 years back and saying stuff like “Please use Netscape” or “Please use IE”. Back then there were real standardization issues amongst browsers.
But rite now there is the w3c standards. Make ur site W3c compliant and it should be viewable on any A-grade browser like Mozilla or safari.
Maybe they did this because it is not really an ecommerce website where the client is actually paying for services and hence expects a certain level on comfort browsing the site, regardless of the browser he uses!!
here l’express is just making money through the publicity and hence whether it looks good or not as long as he gets the hits, its good enough.
Anywayz from my own experience [I am a firefox user and i use 19 inch widescreen monitor] , as soon as i see that IE stuff i am put off by the website…I dun really wanna bother opening the page in IE, i just go surf sumwhere else!!
L’expresse doesnt say : “Please wear tuxedos to buy our newspaper” so y ask ppl to view their website in IE and crap resolution?
Eddy,
Lexpress.mu, which is accessed by many concurrently, needs be scalable (defined as “its ability to handle growing amounts of work in a graceful manner”)
Now, a web application does not become scalable by accident. It must be designed with scalability in mind (for example, by using load balancers, using powerful multithreaded web servers, using stateless components in the middle layer running under a powerful application server and using a database which can handle a large number of concurrent queries.)
I think we both agree in saying that the lexpress.mu web application is not capable of handling the load. You call it bad coding. I call it bad architecture. It’s only a difference in viewpoint. Technically, it’s the same thing. Every single .aspx page is opening its own connection to the database…
Looks like amateurism to me.
Just that you know, I am not the same Ajay posting earlier. :-)
@Vishal – I feel like I’m being pulled into the dream-versus-reality debate again. We all dream of websites that work the same way regardless of browser and that require minimal development effort, but in real life, things are different and nothing prevents a publisher from targeting only one browser. Some may think of it as mere stupidity, but if that fits within their strategy, then why not.
I agree about your assessment of how silly this may be in the current context, though. Still, I am more put off by the crashes than the IE requirement. (After all, I have IE as the first application to be launched when I start my day, and I will not ignore a site just because it tries to bully me with into using Firefox.)
@Avinash – I guess we’ve already established that your view of computing is from ground zero. This is not surprising; you teach (taught) your students about bits and algorithms after all. You mention multithreaded web servers as if they are rare pearls when, in fact, all of them have to be multithreaded to handle concurrent requests. How well that multithreading is implemented is what distinguish them from one another. All the other parts that make an application scalable according to you are bolt-ons. You don’t need to take those into account when you design your application, but rather when you deploy it (and provided you have a good design).
Scalability does not necessarily mean stateless components in the middle layer. Statelessness implies foregoing years of research in good object-oriented design principles (not taking into account other programming paradigm), which cannot be a good thing. Scalability comes for free with a well-designed OO application, so you don’t have to give up on stateful components and such. I would be happy to expand on that, but not during my lunchtime :-)
I am afraid we are not talking about the same thing. You are saying it is bad architecture, but I am saying it is both bad design and bad coding, but mostly bad coding. There is nothing wrong with every single .aspx page opening a connection to the database — this is what you need to do if you want to provide the most up-to-date information and caching is not viable. What is wrong is keeping these connections open for too long and not closing them. It’s an awful mix of bad design and bad coding, not necessarily bad architecture.
Eddy.
Hello.
Since HSC I’ve been taught about how to put a new system in place: for some time we have to have something called phaseover…
Perhaps there was not enough (stress) testing…
And also no plan B in case things go wrong, like reverting to the “old” system that works…
And no proper error management… the try-catch is a good example of things to avoid.
In some sense, the site has portrayed the DONT’s of architecture, programming style (in ASP we use UpperCaseAndLowerCase and not upper_case_and_lower_case as in PHP), error management…
Let’s hope for better days.
So far it’s Defimedia 1 Sentinelle O
Who will be the next joining the battle? Anyway even the MCB internet banking site recommend IE
https://www.mcb-ib.co.mu
And better still the site does not work in Firefox :(
Being a developer on the old version, I second Eddy thoughts, this is bad coding. Especially according to Alexa rankings lexpress.mu is 20, long behind Orange.mu (12), which doesn’t have these problems.
@Joshua – RE: MCB-IB, very interesting, especially that I have just replaced Windows XP with Ubuntu on my desktop and laptop. I wonder how I will be managing my MCB account now.
Eddy.
What the heck?
this sounds just plain stupidity, seems like some hsc kid did some vb application the way it died.
:p the way alexa works .. just makes it untrustworthy information
i would also tend to think its coding error.. people just leaving connection just like that… and also configuration error [hell who would leave debug on in a production environment.. such thing isn’t supposed to happen].
My wife Priscilla has given up on reading lexpress.mu. But it keeps getting “better” by the day. The latest:
Line 409: }
Line 410: }
Line 411: dds.Dispo
Yep. That’s a compilation error occurring while some code monkey was still typing “dds.Dispose()”. Live coding on production servers FTW!
Eddy.
Concerning MCB-IB, I’ve used it on FF 3.x without any problem…
Hello All, Stunning comments out there. The fact is, Those who cannot DO, gt Teach and then Preach. That’s human nature, as is the good or should I say, bad habit of finding fault in everything. But to Err is human… I can only hope that lexpress.mu takes notice of all the posts, specially, Eddy’s comments [… keeping these connections open for too long and not closing them..]and fixes the bugs that seems to be plaguing the site. After all lexpress is offering so much for free and why deprive ourselves the pleasure? Ohh Come on…
Robin H
Hi Robin,
L’express.mu is not working well… whether you like it or not. Of course, back in the USSR days, no one would have dared say anything. But, in 2008, bloggers have the right to write about such things and commenters contribute to the ongoing discussion.
The consensus is that the Lexpress.mu application is badly written. Eddy has said that one issue might be the over-reliance on Finalize() as there is no guarantee it will ever be executed. I have said that the application is making too many queries and it would have been better designed if it relied on a caching business object layer.
Think about it. We are complaining. True. But we are offering insights. This looks like “free” consultancy for me.
As for “Those who cannot Do, go Teach and then Preach”, I guess that this was initially written by someone who had absolutely no aptitudes in teaching and had an horrendous experience doing so. Teaching correctly is an art and few people can do it well. Read this wonderful comment from Reshmi and, maybe, you’ll understand what teaching really is.
@Asvin @Eddy @Joshua
I’ve been banging my head trying to figure out why the MCB site wasn’t working for me (on Firefox) – it only allows IE.
However you can use User Agent Switcher to get around this… :)
Lexpress.mu has issues because it’s bad code-wise (it’s a mess and who in the world updates scripts live?! without a cache layer duh!!! – one asp.net web site is hrdc.mu and it runs well.), there’s no cache-layer and wtf is this over-reliance on the database. some things – yes, can be stored in the db (e.g main articles meant to archive, urls to pictures, etc.) but main stuff (like most commented articles) – rss feed cached in an xml file. no need to retrieve from db – else, it will cake too long.
I wonder how well query optimisation was done.
i’ve read on some other blogs that the site was not w3c compliant – true but what can you expect?! it’s a cms with the master page as compliant but contents is entered by an editor (probably the fckeditor.) the html generated is just a mess for a casual user will be not be editing the html.
back to the site – the beer house project (look it up on codeplex) has its forums scrapped and used at lexpress. it’s way too simple for a site like express. there are serious limitations esp. the input. i hope someone will add an editor to it.
what else? – lack of ssl and use of gdi. when a registered user posts something or edit his acccount – ssl should be used. it’s a standard, like a law. and the use of gdi is a must to make the pictures less bulky in size, add watermarks and borders.
l’express could have gone for drupal and other cms but no! anyway, defi uses article-live which isn’t extensible either but works fine. lexpress could have pwned defi and other newspapers by going for vivvo.net which is beautiful and ready-made.
and where are my rss feeds? what if i don’t want to use lexpress.mu but my rss aggregator to read the news?
“Statelessness implies foregoing years of research in good object-oriented design principles (not taking into account other programming paradigm), which cannot be a good thing.”
The ‘developers’ will tell ya – “who cares” and enjoy the result aka lexpress.mu.
“But to Err is human… I can only hope that lexpress.mu takes notice of all the posts, specially, ”
Dude! In this case, the developers lack skills and should not have taken up the job of creating such a mess! You should revise your statement to – to err is due to the lack of skills and being an idiot. No offense to the devs.
lepress.mu have a footer which states – NOT COMPLIANT TO ISO 9000 and 15504.
“La critique, lorsqu’elle est constructive, ne peut qu’être bénéfique :-)”
I hope that the Lexpress.mu developers will understand that we’re helping them squash their bugs by offering some insightful and constructive criticism.
Ainash take a rescue squad and barge in at la Sentinelle …
shame ! this new site sucks ! mountain of tech faults …. it was one of the most long standing source of news for Mauritians but not anymore esp for people like myself …who would not get out of the car to get a print copy and ‘dhollpuri’ on the side :)
it took me 20 mins to open the e-Paper … finally gave up ! better news sources elsewhere.
They need a crash course …is your new biz doing any of voluntary social work ?
Cheers
the blog is a farce .. talk of control. What are they aiming at doing ?
Cannot believe their knowledge is so obsolete … their arrogance will muffle their ears, they can’t listen to your sound technical advice.
However, their commercial section works very well, that is the l’ExpressProperty.com ..of course, that’s where the dough is after all !
@Avinash. Convinced that teaching is a noble profession :-) Used to be a teacher myself! And no doubt, constructive criticism can only help the lexpress dev folks as I have mentioned. Lets wait and see what happens next Cheers
@Avinash – I doubt that there are L’Express developers involved. Development of the site is outsourced to a small indian company in Delhi, and the project managed by a non-technical L’Express person most probably. Anyone with some sense would see that the state of the site is harming their reputation. Instead, the developers are still being given free reign on the running of the site and they continue to mess with it while it is live. (That last fact shows that they do not know how to manage software development projects.)
Eddy.
@ ashvin ballo,
You can use FF 3.x to access MCB-IB but you cannot use much of its functions like funds transfer, mobile refill ect…
P.S (FF 2.X is supported by MCB-IB) dunno why they don’t support 3.x when its more secured :S
This is arguably one of the worst and ill-timed innovations of the year as far as e-journalism is concerned in Mauritius. I’ll translate that as one small step forward for L’express and a thousand leap backwards for all its online readers!
Why?
1. Its e-newspaper takes decades to load on our paltry and outdated dial-up, 128K or even 512K lines! I’m no big Flash fan either… and would mind reading text on a plain HTML page rather than one glossy and poorly-designed one!
2. Navigation is a real pain. Just check one title page – It reads ‘Help Desk HSC: une transparence pas tres claire – Browser name’ (it’s Mozilla Firefox in my case)’ only. Even a beginner in web design would never have omitted the website name. Who would really know which website he/she’s currently visiting?
4. WordPress or Blogger would have offered much more than their piece of trash.
Btw, Timesonline.co.uk is the best example of a complete online newspaper to my knowledge: it’s fast with a clean and simple interface, putting Web 2.0 to good use. ;-)
Missed point 3. ;-)
3. Their logo is dwarfed by a huge (and very pink too!) Tantebazar.com ad! Mood: “Banging my forehead on the desk”…
winner of the fiasco: tantebazar.com :P
sorry,
c’est rater jean-claude avec les moyen que la sentinelle a c’est une honte de ne pouvoir se hisser a la hauteur de Grande Riviere?
Message Recu??
Agree with Ram, they could benefit from a bit of research of how the best e-newspapers should be …Timesonline and The Guardian are pretty good examples. Reckon they still need a good assessment of their needs as the layout is too all over the place, it looks like someone who is still using a paleontologist’s delight in PageMaker and have not roped in the new DTP packs. The pictures are all squashed and colours palette can send you a mile away panting …
What has happened to the techincal team that once was the pride of offset printing and tabloid layout at Le Sentinelle? They revolutionised the scene in the 1990s. But pretty way way behind now.
What about knowledge of branding at all ? why is tantebazar dwarfing the main logo ? anyway … I should give up here.
Nothing works on that site … let alone layout.
Hey site la encore en amelioration. Banne express fek dire moi nous besoin attane encore 2 mois apres tout pou korek. Pour le moment nous besoin acheter.
Pour informatique, mo pas trop croire c’est banne informaticien competent ki fine faire travail la. Capave banne journaliste meme dans le temps libre zot fine batte sa.
Enfin, site la pli pas bon ki avant dans tout facon.
Yes, .NET is a true real !
— near 17:59
Line 47: try
Line 48: {
Line 49: SqlConnection cn = new SqlConnection(“server=66.165.126.114,4656; database=epaper; User ID=——–; Pwd=T*uchTell%^56;);
Line 50: cn.Open();
Line 51: return cn;
— near 18:02 (try to mask error pages:))
— near 18:11
Another error with the new password :)
Ps: if you know the IP of their internal SEVER you can try :
//SqlConnection cn = new SqlConnection(“server=SERVER; database=lexpress; User ID=sa; Pwd=editor;”);
I think the Lexpress.mu people should really thank people like you who are troubleshooting their application free of charge.
Where has your *Free Everything* spirit gone?
Eddy.
What do you mean? Free as in free speech or as in free beer?
Hey bon banne expresso, accepter ki zot fine rode casse ene paké mais narien pas fine marcher. Defi Media Group is the winner.
Nous tous arrete laguerre aster.
“new SqlConnection(â€server=SERVER; database=lexpress; User ID=sa; Pwd=editor;â€);”
WTF?!!! More importantly, who leaves SQL Server default account as “sa”?!!!
Oh wow! I always thought that Indian dudes kinda rock. WTF have I been thinking?!
I’ve noticed something else. The RSS feeds are broken. For instance, this one contains broken links to articles.
Seriously, this should have been detected while debugging the application.
The feeds are useless. What annoys me that they could snatch the forums off the Beer House project but had to use a generator to create feeds!!! WTF! Could they not learn how to implemented RSS from the Beer House Project.
ref. http://www.codeplex.com/TheBeerHouse
Hi
What a disaster for all Mauritian IT professionals – this is what you call real bad advertisement. Someone rightly said L’Express have turned to Web 0.2! Lol.. Site runs REALLY SLOW, comments can’t be posted (not in Firefox 3 at least), error messages jumping at you every two seconds, no page titles, spelling mistakes every here and there, galleries suck, passwords appearing clearly in error messages… I could go on and on. It’s a never-ending list. Oh by the way, they don’t even use CAPTCHA on their comments form and I have an auto comment poster script that I’ve tried on their website. And guess what?? It works! ;-)
Just wait for the next update from Defimedia. I’ve been told it will happen in a couple of weeks and it will just blow L’Express away.
Defimedia 10
L’Express -10
Hands down. :)
Dear Ako, Defimedia has its flaws too, with its ArticleLife. I’m guessing that the next update will be the new Interspire Website Publisher – from the company who acquired ArticleLife. Both products are not extensible enough. Sorry. Both Defimedia and lExpress suck.
First off, it’s ArticleLive and not ArticleLife. Secondly, it’s the same company. They’ve just changed the product name. Last but not least, the new update will make it totally modular (not that it needed to be to make any modifications, but it’ll be a lot better now)
At least get your facts right if you’re gonna act all haughty and condescending next time.
Maybe you could build a news website that doesn’t suck.. Come on.. Show us some of your talent :)
Maybe you could both stop arguing on my blog…
Fine by me. :)
“First off, it’s ArticleLive and not ArticleLife.”
Semantics!
“Show us some of your talent ”
Sure. Very soon. It’s in the final works.
“At least get your facts right if you’re gonna act all haughty and condescending next time”
I checked it out – even have a demo installed. It’s a mess (view source.) And it doesn’t come close to vivvo.net.
“Maybe you could both stop arguing on my blog…”
I thought that was the purpose of the blog :P
ohhh shit, i missed the flames! i shud check in more often.
@Robin H
:p to err is human, agreed.
To complain is normal :p customer is still king i believe?
To flame is great also, it helps in bringing out ideas… on the other hand to shout out “am leet” and do apps which breaks like shit like lexpress is kind of lame…
and yeah… would it have been better that someone came in and start defacing lexpress [as if it was not already self defaced by the developpers already] :p and then letting the dev trying to figure out wtf just happenned. :p atleast by complaining about thing, they WON’T forget certain lessons.
+$3|v3n
@Shah: It’s in the works? Really? What is it? Vivvo stuffed with plugins made by others?
Enough said.
I’ve just noticed something else… and this is proof that no one really thought about the consequences of this implementation.
Links like http://www.lexpress.mu/display_article.php?news_id=36662 which previously linked to specific articles from the L’Express newspaper do not exist anymore!
I wonder whether they have ever heard of Google at L’Express.
You’re absolutely right. I noticed that too.
At first I was going to set my articles to expire after a year or something (just so the DB wouldn’t get too big to handle all that) but then I realised that we would be losing too much in return for this little performance gain.
All the ‘old’ links that would point to the site would be dead.
Now they’ll never expire. :)
Goog-what?
Why should a publisher be obliged to serve Google with content?
Eddy.
Once more, Eddy, you miss the point :-)
The publisher is serving content to us via Google and any other search engine for that matter.
“I wonder whether they have ever heard of Google at L’Express.”
You seem to think that sitemasters must make their sites Google-friendly. That is not the case; it is up to them to decide what they want to do. Now, if they “killed” those links un-intentionally, then that is a different matter.
“The publisher is serving content to us via Google and any other search engine for that matter.”
Say what!? The publisher is serving content to *me* via its site. Google is just a big index card system that points me to the right published material if I have an interest in something specific. I never use Google to search lexpress.mu, and I dread the time when all our content is searchable only through Google.
Whether La Sentinelle wants to make their content indexable is up to them, but they should not be designing their site with a view to make it reachable via search engines. IF they had been focusing on doing their core business (ie. publishing news), they would not be in this mess. Most users were quite happy with the old version of lexpress.mu; instead they thought it would be cool to follow the crowd and be all Web 2.0-ish (with Google AdSense banners too), and now it is a crappy site that I don’t even bother to look at anymore.
For that matter, my main search engine is live.com.
Eddy.
Pressed tab and Enter by accident, thus submitting the comment before revising.
Corrections:
1. “serving content to us via *its* site”
2. “designing their site with *only* a view to make it reachable via search engines. If the website is good enough, people will head directly for it. You would expect a site like lexpress.mu to be in everyone’s (mauritians’, ie) bookmarks.”
Eddy.
Eddy, you wrote “Now, if they “killed†those links un-intentionally, then that is a different matter.” I’m pretty sure that this is what happened. Someone “forgot” that countless websites, blogs and search engines linked to specific L’Express articles using those links.
In hindsight, I’ll say that L’Express should have kept the old lexpress.mu website online (with everything intact) and used another domain for the new (but, oh so faulty) website.
By the way, most websites get their traffic from Google and this is why the company is valued at more than 1000 billion USD :-)
“By the way, most websites get their traffic from Google and this is why the company is valued at more than 1000 billion USD.”
Irrelevant.
The reach of Google AdSense ads is what creates cash for Google, not the traffic it generates for your site. In other words, your content gives Google its value, not the other way round.
What value would La Sentinelle derive from being indexed by Google? I can think of exactly one: getting some insignificant AdSense revenue. Why is this insignificant? La Sentinelle is an advertiser in its own right, so why place a competitor in its advertising space?
Eddy.
You are right, Eddy. L’Express runs its own advertisements.
But that is not what I was referring to (I didn’t mention AdSense.) I find it bizarre for L’Express to destroy the hundreds of pages it had previously. Now, if this has been done purposely, then why not? But (as you mentioned), this seems to have been done “unintentionally” (I would have used another word…) and this is bound to have a consequence on the website’s Google (and Yahoo! and Live etc.) ranking and, hence, its visibility as most people I know use search engines.
As I wrote above, personally, I would have kept the “old” (but still very valuable) pages around.
Incidentally, I believe that using AdSense instead of developing your own advertisement engine is not a bad idea… money-wise. I may be wrong though.
“But that is not what I was referring to (I didn’t mention AdSense.)”
I brought AdSense into the picture to expand on the point I was making that Google derives more value from sites that it indexes more than it adds to them.
“Incidentally, I believe that using AdSense instead of developing your own advertisement engine is not a bad idea… money-wise. I may be wrong though.”
If you are in the business of advertising, you want to serve ads (just like Google does witth AdSense) not consume them (as you do when publishing AdSense banners).
Now, if you are a publisher (and not an advertiser) and want to monetize on the side, Google AdSense makes, err, sense.
Eddy.
The ego of programmers…this is a hugely debatable issue..
Hi Guys,
This is Vishal. Let’s be on the same wavelength that afterall a website is a central focus of all business in the world of today. As Ashwin illustrated very well, WE CANNOT FAIL. Being a web analyst for almost 10 years now, one thing I’ve learnt is that a business/media website should be extremely accessible to the broad public, be in whatever commercial fields you are. If I were to comment on l’express website I would certify the followings;
L’express website is a great website because it has enormous amount of hits. People must not forget that we are here dealing with a highly praised media platform. In summary, the failure of L’express website is due to a wrong concept. We must not forget that in India we have loads of programmers who does website and trust me, YOU CAN FIND MUCH BETTER WEBSITE DEVELOPERS IN MAURITIUS. It may sound superficial, but trust me I’ve seen great web artists out there right in Mauritius who have been my student once. I don’t say am the best but at least I know what would be best and definitely what would be the fallback to bring L’express website back ontrack. DO NOT UNDERESIMATE THE IMPORTANCE OF LOCAL KNOWHOW… WHEN IT’S RIGHT TO YOUR DOORSTEP SMILING AT YOU!.
VC. For Web Analyst.
Hey check out the new Football Prediction Competition: http://www.defimedia.info/football
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I’m a bit late to the party.
I haven’t visited avinash’s blog in a long time.
eddy – each request opening a connection to the db? that’s awful for any application that opens network sockets. There is a hard limit on the number of open sockets. The common solution is a connection pool.
Any decent server accepting a high number of connections needs to be concurrent, that is a given… threading vs forking? Forking is very decent on POSIX systems with copy-on-write. I’m not sure about forking windows or windows server.
This isn’t intended as a display of geek macho-ness. take the remarks as coming from a friend to another friend. This might come in handy!
On politics the messages are filtered ,if you are pro l’express then the message is shown on the net immedaitely , if you are against l’express views then 90% you message wil not be posted
How do you know that? And, if confirmed, does L’Express.mu explicitly say they’ll do that for some comments (in an EULA or something)? Or else, this feels like censorship.
” Furthermore, Flash and Google are not really good friends… ”
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13530_3-9844989-28.html
Thanks for the info. It seems that Google now can “see” the text within flash files. Personally, I believe the next generation of website will be done with HTML5, CSS and Javascript. By the way, YouTube has a non-Flash version now, http://www.youtube.com/html5