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Gondo's new site crashes and burns in opening hours

From: JP -- venfl.com
Date: 03/24/08
Time: 08:35 AM

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New web address, new look, new navigation, no news. Sometime around 8:00 AM this morning, the Venice Gondolier Sun unexpectedly launched an all new version of its news web site -- and then took its old web site completely down. Currently, any web links to older news articles from this web site, from Google, Wikipedia, AOL Search, etc., all lead to dead pages.

Sometime around 8:00 AM this morning, all internet requests for content at venicegondolier.com were being redirected to the front page of the new site, sunnewspapers.net. This includes links from all search engines to news stories that were previously available within the Gondo's web site. The net effect is that searched-for older news stories listed in all search engines, indeed even the Gondo's entire back-catalog of online news stories, are now unavailable.

Their current news stories don't fare any better. Current news articles from the local Gondolier newspaper, linked to, strangely, at the bottom of the front page of the web site,  lead to collapsed pages that include no news stories. Instead, the front page of the site is loaded inside another version of the front page, causing web browsers to lock up.

While some of the technical details will, no doubt, be fixed as time goes by, the loss of links to older archived news is damned near unforgivable.

Inquiries to the Gondo's web department are underway.