Social Media Domination

With every mistake comes an opportunity. I'm lucky some folks believe this because I make mistakes.

Last night I did a doozy!

We've got an incredibly robust templating engine in our application that allows full customization. Our engineers have versioning control so that as we release new features in the template, we don't ever break our clients' customizations in their template.

While doing some homework late last night, I put a new template version live on our Compendium Blogs. The only problem was that the new template wasn't prepared to go live yet!

So - if you happened to visit our site this morning, you probably noticed a pretty funky layout for our blog with a nice clean (blank) sidebar. Yea... that was my fault!

Quite a few of the team scrambled when I did it late last night - including Chantelle, James, Megan, Mikey, PJ and Blake. (Did I miss anyone?) I walked in this morning - and after a few questions from Blake realized that I was the one that pulled the trigger. Doh!

One plus is that we're now on the new template and it's got a much nicer layout that's more user and search friendly. Another plus - I'll be spending some time with the folks as I buy them lunch for causing them some late night angst. Sorry guys!

Note: This isn't something an ordinary client can do and our support team has some great processes in place to prevent this. We even have a template backup that I use when I work on clients' sites. I didn't follow any of those processes last night! That won't happen again.

I'm sure there's some technology improvements that can be made as well - I'll leave that to our product team. After all, if I can do it... you know someone else will!