Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Is your bookmark up to date?


If you stumbled on this post because you were trying to find the Capital Press website and thought it had disappeared, fear not. The Capital Press website is alive and well, but it may not be where you thought it was.

The main website address, or URL, for the Capital Press is www.capitalpress.com. We have it printed in the paper, on bumper stickers, on the sides and/or backs of company vehicles. It's a well-traveled domain name. However, it appears there may be lots of people out there who have a different address — www.capitalpress.info — bookmarked. We've also seen numerous websites that also link to pages with that root URL.

That's completely understandable, albeit disappointing given the effort we've made to publicize the .com address. The capitalpress.info address was the original website address for the Capital Press website. We changed it, or tried to change it, a few years back. But if people held on to the old domain it was no big deal because the dot-info address still worked. It just redirected folks to, or mirrored, the .com website. One site, two addresses.

But, after the launch of the new Capital Press website over the weekend, we had a situation for a while where the dot-info address was pointed to the old website, which was no longer being updated, instead of the new, revamped website. So, we got that stopped and the old website is no longer live, but we have not yet got the old dot-info address pointed to the new, correct and updated site.

As of this writing, if you type in the www.capitalpress.info address (or use a bookmark with that address or follow a link that uses that address) you are likely getting an error that says: "Bad Request (Invalid Host Name)".

We are working on redirecting the dot-info address to the new www.capitalpress.com server. As soon as is humanly and technically possible, we will get that switched over. But if you want to do yourself, and us, a favor, just point your browser to capitalpress.com. That will get you to the new website now.

Sorry about the glitch folks. It was one of the many unintended pitfalls we've encountered in our website update, but it may be one of the biggest roadblocks to longtime, loyal website readers finding us. We have seen website traffic drop by about one-third or more since the conversion. The misdirected domain name and broken dot-info links seem the most likely cause. However, we are also likely missing out on some visitors because our RSS feed has changed too and as a result our headlines aren't feeding into our Twitter account via Twitterfeed right now either. There some sort of coding glitch that keeps Twitterfeed from telling there are new headlines in the RSS feed we are trying to make it munch on. And if you have an RSS feed reading into Google or Newsgator or some other RSS aggregator that link has been severed too.

If you do use an RSS aggregator or widget of some sort, I have some good news for you. We have multiple RSS feeds now, so you can get even more focused feeds. We have not yet put together a fill list of our RSS feeds because we may still want to add more of them. But you can find several links to the new RSS feeds on some of the popular sections of our website, like our Oregon/Washington, California, Idaho and Livestock section. You can also find the link to RSS for the part of our site that always includes our most recently posted stories. Even our Calendar is RSS enabled.

We are still online. We are still here. Here just may not be where you though it was, or where it once was, or will be once again when we get all the right servers and routers talking to one another.



1 comment:

Unknown said...

The capitalpress.info domain now points to our website again.

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