How to be an online editor when you can’t go online

by Joshua Chan, illustration by Chloe McDaniels

It’s hard not to be ever-so-slightly demoralized when you’re starting the semester as the online editor of a site that’s deemed “unsafe” by most browsers. But that was an easy fix, since we just had to update the SSL certificate — a little designation that your site is safe. But when any sort of technical fix has to go through the university’s Academic Technology, the real problems arise. Oh boy, did they arise this semester.

The problems started on Oct. 2, when “xpressmagazine.org” went down with an HTTP 500 error, meaning that the error couldn’t even be identified, but the site wouldn’t work anyway. The problem was big enough to warrant intervention from BlueHost, our former server provider, and thus, the site went down until Oct. 7. Of course, I only found out the site went up because I checked it incessantly over that week with no notification, but that would only be the start.The absence of a working website was further exacerbated by a lack of updates on the site’s status.

The problems then started up again on Oct. 8, when the site would load but administrator access was blocked. It took two days worth of emails for Xpress Magazine to learn that this would be a more significant problem than any previous issues. It took until Oct. 14 to even get any information on the problems affecting both our site and the website for Golden Gate Xpress, and that was only after pestering our advisor for any updates about possible solutions. While I’m grateful for Academic Technology’s involvement in our site and its process of fixing the site, more transparency about the department’s potential solutions to the problems would have been appreciated.

On Nov. 1, xpressmagazine.org finally came back up, but again, it took someone else noticing for any sort of indication that the site was up. Even then, the site was online with an Oct. 6 backup, and again, the caveat that we couldn’t update the site at all. It took until Nov. 6 to even bring students into a meeting to consider a new server host, all while both Xpress Magazine and Golden Gate Xpress were still down (both sites are up as of publishing).

If you’re wondering what it’s like to be the online editor of a site that isn’t even online, this is what it’s like. It’s a lot of emailing, pestering people for any information on any status update possible and a lot of wondering how stories will go up for writers on Xpress Magazine, who often reach far beyond San Francisco.

For that, we have medium.com/xpress-magazine, which is where our writers’ stories will go temporarily due to our sparse print schedule (that’s a topic for another day). Our classmates deserve to have their stories somewhere on the Internet, and this was the next best thing to do. On it, you’ll see previous stories from the previous print issue and this print issue, along with great multimedia accompaniments from our writers.

All this is to say that it’s weird being an online editor when you can’t go online. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t stories to be read, or that you can’t do something new. A ship made of old content might be a ship of Theseus, but it’s still a ship. It’s better than not having any stories accessible for a previous staffer who wished to share them.

A thanks goes out to Don Menn, who always updated the Xpress staff about the site’s status, and Tomáš Furmánek, who always answered emails about the site’s problems promptly.

Thanks for reading. X