Hard Launch at Baltimore Sun
Our first day with the merge went reasonably well. Some notes:
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Our legacy system, Sii, had been modified to accept another field, the new classification field, e.g. the five-digit classification such as 40100, 40150, 40200 and so on for Employment, for example. The field is just a type-in field and is not validated against a table of known good classes. As a result we got a few bogus classes which caused problems in pagination. It was clear that we had bad classes because they appear in the class listing at the beginning of the pagination by number, rather than being inside the defined class super groupings with names (e.g. Auction, auto, etc.).
We addressed this in two ways: one, we went back and fixed the field in the affected ads, re-extracted, and paginated. Second, on an extraction which was running very late, I went in and modified the classsrt.out file manually to correct the erroneous class. However, there is no easy way to know if a keying error resulted in a classification that exists but is not correct for the ad until it is noticed or someone complains.
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The Death index process that we developed is sort of involved, and did not include all ads for some reason. SCS may be enlisted to help develop something better. It may involve parsing the ceps.out file to try to extract the first line with the deceased's name, or may involve having CCI output something we can use.
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Even one merged pagination took a lot of time. If we were to do this over again we might introduce only one at a time rather than three (Auto/Market, Deaths, Boats).
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Fonts have to be checked and rechecked at every CCI upgrade and change in procedure. You should do a full test all the way to output on any change. We discovered late that there are apparently two symbol fonts used on CCI, one in a dropdown, one in the font set. We had to install the second one (called just Symbol) quickly all along the proof and film output paths on the day of launch.
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Rather than trying to use the reports from SCS which never seem to have what we want, I have been creating a report generated from data extracted from the full-blown outext.txt file, imported into SQL server, then interpreted via Crystal Reports. This will soon be fully automated and we will be collecting daily data on all our paginations for future uses we might only imagine today. Given the current state of data availability from CCI, this might be an approach worthwhile for other properties.
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Test early and often! Courage!
============
-JoAnne
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Our legacy system, Sii, had been modified to accept another field, the new classification field, e.g. the five-digit classification such as 40100, 40150, 40200 and so on for Employment, for example. The field is just a type-in field and is not validated against a table of known good classes. As a result we got a few bogus classes which caused problems in pagination. It was clear that we had bad classes because they appear in the class listing at the beginning of the pagination by number, rather than being inside the defined class super groupings with names (e.g. Auction, auto, etc.).
We addressed this in two ways: one, we went back and fixed the field in the affected ads, re-extracted, and paginated. Second, on an extraction which was running very late, I went in and modified the classsrt.out file manually to correct the erroneous class. However, there is no easy way to know if a keying error resulted in a classification that exists but is not correct for the ad until it is noticed or someone complains.
===========
The Death index process that we developed is sort of involved, and did not include all ads for some reason. SCS may be enlisted to help develop something better. It may involve parsing the ceps.out file to try to extract the first line with the deceased's name, or may involve having CCI output something we can use.
===========
Even one merged pagination took a lot of time. If we were to do this over again we might introduce only one at a time rather than three (Auto/Market, Deaths, Boats).
===========
Fonts have to be checked and rechecked at every CCI upgrade and change in procedure. You should do a full test all the way to output on any change. We discovered late that there are apparently two symbol fonts used on CCI, one in a dropdown, one in the font set. We had to install the second one (called just Symbol) quickly all along the proof and film output paths on the day of launch.
===========
Rather than trying to use the reports from SCS which never seem to have what we want, I have been creating a report generated from data extracted from the full-blown outext.txt file, imported into SQL server, then interpreted via Crystal Reports. This will soon be fully automated and we will be collecting daily data on all our paginations for future uses we might only imagine today. Given the current state of data availability from CCI, this might be an approach worthwhile for other properties.
===========
Test early and often! Courage!
============
-JoAnne
posted by JoAnne at 1:29 AM
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