Salon wants to sell its homemade CMS (OK, here's the $199 link)
Read Salon's very confident pitch. Then is it normal that when I do a search at Salon.com:

• results sorted by date don't show a date


• older pages are shown inside an old template (21st has been renamed Technology months ago)


• the old template now traps you into the old site (click archives in the top navbar to get back into time), or even leads you to empty categories. Click "search" from there to get a beautiful broken link. Missed opportunity for a nice 404!

I'm naïve but I would expect:

• one of the biggest online publisher to migrate seamlessly its older content into new page templates


• a would-be CMS software publisher to have a better practice to showcase

Yes, even from a magazine I like, depressed stock and all. But that's only me (or is it?)
Of course Salon doesn't make their own search engine, but their publishing system should index stuff in a meaningful way. You publish to get read, and a search engine is one of the ways people will do that. I also was nasty enough to use a graphic navbar, that wasn't updated to the new structure contrarily to text links. But who's going to figure that out?

Shoestring non-recursive protection clause: I know Atomz doesn't index my blog properly, but I'm just a solo amateur, not an almighty professional that checks his facts and gets his act together, so... you'd better live with it. (05/17/01 update: I fixed it since, though Atomz works with pages, not individual posts, so search results all have the same name).

I told you I'd be a bad guy today. That's what happens when I'm tired. And being woken up by the news of more stupid laws by our beloved Communist Minister of Transportation didn't help. Yes, we have Communists in the French government, and their not ashamed to rule through "fear of the police" (broken link to Le Monde removed on 05/03/01), here known as peur du gendarme.

05/17/01 update: Salon Reports Losses Are Shrinking, but, Unfortunately, So Are Revenues:
"O'Donnell said subscriptions would not become part of Salon's mix, and wouldn't comment about CreationEngines, a spin off Salon was planning that would sell commercial versions of the site's publishing software. On the conference call, O'Donnell said work on the software had been suspended as of the end of March and its projected sales revenues had been dropped from Salon's future revenue estimates."