OK, so it wasn’t that dramatic- certainly nothing like the MySpace outage. But we did have a couple of problems today. The main postalnews.com page started loading very slowly at some point during the day, and it apparently had something to do with the poll we added a while back. Removing the poll cured the problem, so we took it off for a couple of hours. It’s back now, and the site is still running fine, so we’ll just keep an eye on it.

The other issue was with this site, postalnewsblog.com. We upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, 2.1, which is quite slick. Unfortunately we neglected to make sure the final step in the upgrade completed successfully, and as a result, looked a little blank for 30 minutes or so. Once that was taken care of, we discovered that the new WP broke the template we’d been using. We’ve switched to Shamsul Azar’s Tiga, which I really like.

Any comments you might have on the new design are welcome, and don’t forget to bookmark postalnews.info, our backup site, for when blogs REALLY go bad….

That’s the opinion, apparently, of one APWU member, who has set up a blog entitled ‘APWU Dictatorship’. You can read his complaints against local President Rick Cornelius at APWUDictatorship.blogspot.com, and you can read Cornelius’s side at the official APWU local site, titled, interestingly enough, not APWU197.org, as it once was, but “UnionRick.com“.

A lot has been written the lasy year or so about ‘web 2.0′, ‘the long tail’, and the changes in the ways people interact with what they see online. What does that have to do with advertising mailers? Quite a bit, according to this series on Marigold Technologies’ Direct Marketing blog:

Direct mail meets Web 2.0

Not a whole lot! There is one thing though- we both happen to be hosted on servers located in the same building in Los Angeles- the Garland Building. And that, my friends, is why you may have run into problems accessing postalnews for several periods over the last couple of weeks. It was during that same timeframe that myspace.com was also knocked offline several times.

I was pretty miffed about the outages, but I don’t feel so bad now, seeing that all of Rupert Murdoch’s money couldn’t keep the most popular web site in the world online. Dreamhost, the service we use, yesterday published a lengthy entry on their blog with all the gory details, which is also a good thing- I like companies that are honest and open about their mistakes (hint hint USPS?).

And here’s a link to bookmark on the off chance that it happens again- postalnews.info . That’s our non-Dreamhost, non-blogger.com site that we’ll use to post updates about problems with our sites.