Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Another Stupid Web Page

Caption: The "legacy" version of Five Thirty-Eight. Nowadays, you land there, start to read, and then kawoosh!, you're on Planet Sulzberger.

Image credit: Screenshot of a Five Thirty-Eight page by Cujo359

As readers may or may not be aware, the site Five Thirty-Eight was recently moved to new digs at The New York Times. That's all well and good; there is such a thing as progress, after all, and such a thing as getting paid for all the work you do. At least, I've heard that happens sometimes. So I don't blame the 538 crew for moving on.

However, that doesn't stop me from being annoyed at the condition they've left the old site in. Try to go to a link at the old site, say this one. See what happens? After a delay that's just long enough to fool you into thinking it's worth starting to read the article, it takes you to the front page of the NYT site. Not to the version of that article that's on the new site.

That's just what happened to me when I followed a link from this article I finally had to save the page to my hard disk, edit out the refresh command, and then load it from there.

What moron thought that was a good idea? It's so stupid that Five Thirty-Eight now deserves its own special mention as a Stupid Web Page. Congratulations.


No comments: