TechCrunch is Down. Michael is miffed

February 12, 2007 by Chris · 3 Comments

TechCrunch is down to a series of misfortunes and software challenges. Arrington says he’s pissed. Here’s a snip that caught my eye:

Today we had three problems. [...] We switched to the new version of wordpress which is clearly not bug free. And on top of that we have a number of plugins that are acting weird on the new wordpress software. One of them took us down earlier tonight.

Let’s address this portion of his post.

Now, perhaps I’m simplifying a bit … but if I ran a large high-volume site based on WordPress, I wouldn’t upgrade it live until I’d tested it. Setting up another site with the same theme and plugins is trivial. Getting some content to that test site is easy too (See the import plugin for use pre-2.1 as an example).

Why not test it first? Are there no IT folks involved in the *crunch enterprise? Or IT experience at any rate?

Also, before upgrading to a major new version why not glance at the support forums? Spend a half hour checking out the problems other folks are having and determine if those problems apply to you. Read the release notes, check the plugin compatibility pages.

Now, upgrade the test site. Exercise the plugins. Ensure that the theme still works. Then upgrade the live site that has a kabillion people looking at it daily.

What’s that? Takes too much time? Well, yeah it would take an hour or two. Seems like a cheap alternative to a complete outage.

Possibly Related posts:

Tags: arrington, techcrunch, web2.0, WordPress

Comments

3 Responses to “TechCrunch is Down. Michael is miffed”

Aaron Brazell says:

February 12, 2007 at 12:55 pm

Yeah – he’s stupid. That’s why there are consultants like me to do this stuff. If Mike can’t handle that with his wallet, well, he had what he had coming.

Reply
Chris says:

February 12, 2007 at 6:02 pm

Aaron – can’t say I disagree; I think my way of saying it was more polite.

Time to invest in IT a bit. Or have him and Matt hook up for some “prestige” wordpress.com hosting…

Reply
Aaron Brazell says:

February 12, 2007 at 11:32 pm

Eh… yeah. Life’s too short to be polite when you can just be blunt.

Reply