Posts tagged failures
For a few minutes this morning, CNN ran an incorrect headline declaring that a significant part of President Barack Obama’s healthcare law had been struck down by the Supreme Court.
I captured the image above manually several minutes ago. CNN has already corrected the page with a new headline.
The error was missed by PastPage’s hourly script, which visits CNN once per hour. The last visit happened at 10:02 AM EDT, before CNN made a judgement. When it visits again in the next hour, the error will certainly still be gone.
This shows just how quickly news sites can change the framing of stories and proves that even PastPages’ hourly screenshot is wanting. One of my goals with the future development of the site is to increase how frequently it captures data. Al Shaw has suggested we allow for instant on-demand archival when a human spots an error that ought to be captured.
@palewire PastPages totally needs a GO NOW button that you can mash when shit gets crazy
— Al Shaw (@A_L) June 28, 2012
If you’re a developer and you’d like to help make this happen, all of the code is open on GitHub and I’d welcome your contributions.
