January 20, 2011 at 6:01 PM EST
Eating Crow
For weeks, we’ve been making a series of pronouncements on this blog: We’re going to launch – soon! The week of Jan. 17, in fact!
Oops.
The details first: We’re not going to hit our Jan. 18 launch target. We’ll get into the reasons in a moment. And because I’m suitably chagrined by this post, I’ve banned the team from even breathing aloud potential rescheduled dates for our launch. “Soon” will have to suffice.
What happened?
First, we’re using software that’s brand new to PBS (the Ellington CMS from Mediaphormedia, an outgrowth of Adrian Holovaty’s work on the Django programming framework). The Ellington folks have been terrific – but we asked them to make their system do some things that it had never done before.
Surprise! We’ve got a few bugs.
We’ve been squishing ‘em for the past few weeks, and we’re making steady progress. But bug-tracking has forced some of our content production to take too much of a back seat.
More to the point, the more we stare at our initial design, the more some little things started to bother us.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m a huge believer in the notion of minimum viable product, and launching when you’re less than “pixel perfect.” (Let’s face it: You’re rarely pixel perfect on the web - and if you manage it, you don't stay that way for very long.)
But when one element of your design inspires near-universal confusion (and the confusion quickly turns to revulsion), well, that’s a showstopper.
So we’re calling for a reboot. We’ll keep you updated, and we expect to know a lot more by the end of January.
Some of you have also noted a change in our name, to PBSNews.org. That issue is simpler: Trademarks. Someone else has a valid trademark on the name we wanted to use; it slipped beneath our initial screens, but not the in-depth checks our lawyers made later.
(Turns out my grandma was wrong: garlic doesn’t make everything taste better. I tried soaking this post in as much as I could get my hands on. As it happens, garlic-drenched crow still tastes like crow.)
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