A blog from The Herald and www.thisisplymouth.co.uk

Wednesday 11 June 2008

Abruptly, the sound ceased

Two amazing things happened last night. Firstly we launched a new-look website after months of planning and preparation, and secondly my other new baby slept for FIVE hours in her own cot!!!
I say months of planning, but the actual build of the live site was done in about seven working days. Seven days in which my second-in-command on the web team here was on holiday, seven days in which I also had to run the old thisisplymouth and seven nights in which I wasn't getting ANY sleep.
Of course before embarking on the build process I prayed to the Gods of News to keep everything quiet for a while to make the whole thing easier. Of course that doesn't work, there are no Gods of News. They are all demons.
But here it is, the new site. Brighter, fresher. cleaner. Hopefully you will be able to find everything you want a lot more easily. If not shout and I'll point you in the right direction.
So far the comments have stopped flooding in. Mostly because you now have to register to comment, so no more fake emails and no more trying to get around being blocked.
And while silence reigned online last night, it also reigned in my bedroom.
Delta is now 38 days old, and for the first time in, well, 38 days she decided to give sleep a try. And it seems she liked it.
Up until this point sleep has been taken only in three to four minute snatches, bookended by the high-pitch wailing you would normally associate with a banshee or a nuclear reactor about to go into meltdown.
Last night she watched Big Brother, fell asleep, slept for five hours, woke up to feed then went straight back to sleep and woke up again at 6am. IT'S A MIRACLE.
As with our first we've tried to be fully organic with Delta. But as Trinity was placid from the start it was easy to avoid chemical medicine at most points. Something wrong with the baby? Try massaging her with marjoram.
But when you're subjected to sleep deprivation like they use at Camp X-Ray, (didn't they change it's name to Camp Delta?...hang on a minute) Western medicine starts to look more attractive.
Sure we start out with the Infacol, then at 2am I'm starting to shout "DRUGS, MORE DRUGS" and at 4am I'm reaching for that old bottle of liquid morphine I've got left over from when I had my gall bladder out.
But it seems launching the new site worked to clam Delta down. I think it was preying on her mind.
Of course it would have been easier if two days into the build they didn't radically redesigned the basic structure of the site, then three hours before the launch redesigned the graphics and the navigation system.
And it would have been easier if commercial hadn't suddenly woken up to the fact we were getting a new site two days before it launched and suddenly started saying "where's that link no-one ever uses and when they do it doesn't work, I want it up here"
But it's all over now (ish) and there are several great new things you can do with the site. Every channel (news, crime, South east Cornwall etc) has its own rss, so you can subscribe to be updated with the news you want, and there is a /forward for each channel too to make it easier to navigate.
In a novelty we thought we'd try a search facility that actually works, and you can search across sites so if you like you can read articles from thisishull. Well, someone may want to.
It does have its disadvantages. Trying to keep the order of stories as you want it is like trying to herd yogurt.
So if you suddenly see "Seagull trapped on roof" as the top story, we haven't turned into thisisexeter (website of the year 2007), and normal service will soon be resumed.
The story ordering seems to work on Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principal (what do you mean you have no basic grasp of quantum physics?).
For those who haven't read A Brief History of Time or the technical manual for a Starfleet transporter pad, the uncertainty principle means we can predict where a story will appear, or when, but not both - and usually neither.
Ah well, we'll get used to it.
Let me know what you think. I'm sure Delta will.