Report to our readers – when you open the door and the house is empty – were you robbed ?

By Staff

BURLINGTON, ON  February 17, 2011  –  Well, we weren’t robbed but when we went to open the door last Wednesday – there was nothing there.  It took a bit to figure out what had happened – someone misread a situation and a story and did something really stupid.

As a result we had to do an almost complete re-build of the web site which gave us a chance to make some changes that were on the back burner and make the site a bit more attractive – gave it a bit of a snappier look.

Then we have to reload all the stories – still work to do at that level – and of course get on with all the new and recent news. Four stories were loaded this afternoon

A young techie working with us did an incredible job of handling the rebuild.  He put in long hours and did some interesting work.  Odd though, how these younger people work today.  Us older types – you know the ones that were around in the 50’s – tend to stick to a task until it’s done – even if that means being up all night.

Our techie doesn’t bring quite that level of dedication. He clicked on to the web camera at Spencer Smith Park and saw all the ice on the Lake and immediately drove down to the park and walked out on the ice.  Whoa, I thought when I heard that – this is the brains that is re-building the system and he is out walking on ice?  How thick was that ice?  How ‘thick’ was that `techie?   But he survived and if you ask him he will tell you how thick that ice was.

Before the melt down we accumulated 3041 unique users in 118 days.  A unique user is someone who logs into the web site at least once from a specific computer.  The most read story –I’m almost ashamed to say this – was the story of a dog naming contest, second most read was the one on the soccer Mom’s.

Those 3041 users visited the web site 9,229 times in that 118 days and while they were there read 70,145 pages (seems like a lot doesn’t it) and while doing so spent an average of 7.5 minutes on the web site.  For a start up that cares only about Burlington – those are seen as good numbers – or at least that is what the experts tell us.

We made our share of mistakes and issued a correction each time there was an error.  Comments from readers were ‘”few” but robust.

The “beat” goes on.

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