Saturday, June 7th, 2008

Engine What?

By: Robert Baskin (Online Director)

So finally we come to the Server header, which I have alluded to previously.

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

It’s the Little Things in Life

By: Robert Baskin (Online Director)

I know I said my next post would have to do with our new Server header that we’re sending back, but I just wanted to get this in while it’s fresh in my mind. And plus, MySQL optimization is always worth talking about!

Saturday, May 3rd, 2008

Slice and Dice

By: Robert Baskin (Online Director)

So in my last post, I promised I would write up some of the work we planned to do to improve performance when we had a chance to actually implement the proposed changes. Well, we’ve done quite a bit of work in the past week. I’ll talk about some of the changes and leave some [...]

Friday, April 25th, 2008

The Day the Music Died

By: Robert Baskin (Online Director)

Last Thursday around 8 a.m., I received a phone call from our Online Editor informing me that the Web site was down, and politely asking if I could get it back online as soon as possible. It seems we had been linked to by the Drudge Report (to our story on Aliza Shvarts), and the [...]

Sunday, April 20th, 2008

Apology for Duplicate Emails

By: Robert Baskin (Online Director)

Dear YaleDailyNews.com subscribers,
Some of you may have erroneously received many duplicate emails from the Yale Daily News in the past few minutes. It was a result of server testing we were conducting to improve our headlines email service, and it went awry. I want to apologize for the error, and assure you that we are [...]

Monday, March 31st, 2008

Making the Site Faster

By: Robert Baskin (Online Director)

Last summer, I interned at Yahoo as Backend Engineer for Yahoo News, which was a fantastic experience. While I was there, Yahoo released a product called YSlow, which is a plug-in for Firebug — the most useful Firefox extension ever created. It analyzes Web pages, tells you why they’re slow and how to make them [...]

Tuesday, March 4th, 2008

Behind the Scenes of the Crime Map

By: Robert Baskin (Online Director)

On February 19th, we decided to create the Crime Map. We launched it March 3rd, just 13 days later. This is our story.
We decided to retrieve the crimes data from the Yale Police Department daily crime logs. The next task was how to present the data. We knew we wanted a map, and for a [...]

Thursday, January 10th, 2008

Welcome to the Yale Daily News Online Blog!

By: Robert Baskin (Online Director)

Welcome to the Yale Daily News Online blog! We decided to start this to give you an inside look into the operations of YaleDailyNews.com. We’re going to talk about all sorts of different things – new online content we produce, technical challenges we face, decisions we’re faced with, and more.
The current site has been completely [...]