KildareStreet news

A quick note about apparent nonsense displaying and delayed email alerts

For reasons I cannot hope to explain, the Oireachtas has a production process for the Official Record which is bound by no formal timeframes, nor any published targets, nor apparently any guarantee that the material produced will be correct within a timeframe useful to anyone but historians.

Today, for the second time in a week, the official data from which we generate this web site has been released on the official website in a severely mangled manner. You can see at the time of writing that yesterday, the adjounment debate apparently contained over three hundred and fifty contributions, there were no written answers to questions, and the phrase "as of 01 May 2009" has been inexplicably promoted to the rank of "major heading".

(Update, Tuesday: The official version was corrected on Monday afternoon. Which is nice, but doesn't really excuse the fact that it was broken for four and a half days.)

I've found the garbage in question and manually changed our own copy of the file. We're rather hoping the sudden appearance of screaming howlers like this (none in five years, then two in a week) is in some way connected to someone going on holiday, rather than an indication of things to come.

In the meantime, I can't run the daily email alerts until 'today' is not bugridden for fear of those alerts containing incorrect links. Those 200-odd people who are signed up to alerts may find that our RSS feeds, which are available for any and every query that alerts can cover, are more 'immediate'.

Thanks for bearing with us.

I'll tell you about how the Oireachtas mail server is blocking all our sign up confirmation emails and email alerts (for no reason) another day. This issue with mail was apparently resolved by Monday, and the very polite and helpful IT staff there have been in touch subsequently, and so it's not fair to leave that line in this post unstruck. We're figuring it out at the moment. -- JH 19-05-09

-- John Handelaar

Posted on 8 May 2009 at 18:30:00 | Link to this