The James Logan Courier

Courier Staff Report

Apparent software glitches at The Courier's Internet Service Provider, Visionhead Technologies, sidelined the Union City-based online student "newspaper," said to be the only daily, 365-days-per-year, high-school-based news operation of its kind in the world, for most of the day Sunday, but the problems were solved in time for the paper to greet its 50,000th visitor.




Courier technicians discovered the glitch at around 5 a.m., when attempts to access the website were greeted with error messages instead of the familiar page design. Service technicians at Visionhead were immediately contacted via email and cell phone, and soon efforts to access The Courier found the website of a small communications company. Further discussions via email between The Courier's technical department and Visionhead's revealed that initial suspicions that the trouble stemmed from the Apache software which runs behind the Courier's Nucleus software alone were unfounded.

Several hours of work were needed to find and solve the problem; meanwhile would-be readers of The Courier found error messages from The Courier's mySQL database, instead.

Stories which were posted before the outage replaced the mySQL gibberish by about 3 p.m.

Technicians weren't able to update the page with the usual Sunday features such as the color comics from Raman Rataul, The Cartoonminator and Christine Jue, or the daily "In Quotes" historical feature until about 8 p.m.

But that was in time to have the page up and running for the visit of The Courier's 50,000th reader since it began daily operations in March, 2006. As of 8:30 p.m., when the Sunday features were posted, The Courier had welcomed 49,986 readers.

The Courier welcomed its 50,000 reader at 9:05 p.m.