Please stand by ... for Capital Press website

In the old days of television, if there was a problem there would be flashed on the screen something about "technical difficulties, please stand by."

Diligently we'd stand by, unless, of course, we were sitting on our cozy sofas waiting for the television station to resume service. In the days of not many channels, we didn't really have a choice at times.

Unfortunately, in the fast, exciting world of the Internet when we as an information provider have problems, it can be aggravating to us as well as our customers when something affects our Website.

The challenge is how to let people know there's a problem, and how to encourage them to be patient with us — and hopefully return to surfing our site later.

We want to post breaking news and news updates, especially the day after elections have been held in several states and as the 2007 Farm Bill continues to be debated in Washington, D.C.

However, anyone trying to access our website today (and perhaps yesterday) may have had delays or been unable to open our site pages.

We weren't the only newspaper to experience this. It ends up being a problem with our website provider, who handles our newspaper and other clients. Seems we've been hit by those awful "bots" again ... automatic search engine programs that crawl through the Internet and pop in and out of sites so they can create an index of what they found on sites.

They can sometimes overwhelm the sites and not allow other traffic through. Occasionally companies get hit with these, despite best efforts to block the sometimes malicious attacks.

Anyway, out internet provider is working on the problem and hopes to have it resolved perhaps later today.

Until then, please stand (sit) by...

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