PR junkie

The week the links broke on PR Daily

I'd love to blame it on a virus. Tell you that some seditious little bastard with too much time on his hands used his parents DSL line to hack into PR Daily's content management system and start unplugging wires and plugging them back into the wrong outlets.

If only this were the case.

As many--indeed, many--readers of PR Daily, of which I am the managing editor, pointed out this week, the links to several stories on the website and in the e-newsletter were broken. If this happens once, well, big deal, it happens, you fix it; you move on. Sure it's not a best practice, but nothing to scramble the jets about.

Problem was it kept happening: On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday--there were two broken links on Wednesday. My frustration was bottomless, abysmal. But instead of banging my head against the wall--OK, I did bang my head against the wall for a while--or drinking--OK, so, I drank bit, too--I got to the bottom of the problem.

Briefly, the problem was caused by garbled code and an internal error on our part.

I can't promise it won't happen again. Believe me, I'd like to, but experience has now taught me that making such a vow is foolish. In the meantime, I'll just have to remember that relative to all the injustices in the world, this one is minor--it doesn't even register, not by a long shot.

But it's still frustrating as hell.