Huge disappointment & complete failure!
I don’t have any other words to describe the new version of l’express.mu, a site which I visited daily to get the latest news!
When I visited the site yesterday night (Sunday), the new “web 2.0” was already online, with loads of errors.
I was going to blog about it, but however I said to myself, perhaps that they are on a testing phase, so I should give them some time, until today during which the site was going to be officially launched.
However, during the day, I noticed that Island Crisis had already blogged about this new version of l’express.mu where a guest author was complaning about the site itself.
On my way back home, my colleague Ashvin told me to check the site, since there was a .NET crash, the famous yellow screen 😛
Bad strategy ?
According to me, the new version of l’express.mu should have launched, besides the existing one for many practical reasons.
Despite being a cyber island, where we are selling our expertise to foreign countries, an Indian Company (4C plus) has been selected for the development of the site.
Built with Latest Technologies?
Despite that .NET Framework 3.5 is already available since months, the web site has been developped using the 2.0 version :S
The lack of proper use of Ajax and awful UI is so obvious…
For example, when you click on the different tabs below, no feedback or loading image…and a few seconds later, you will barely notice that the “tab” has been changed!
You may also notice the time that the pages take to load or timeout problem due to server problems.
e-version?
As mentioned in an article by Avinash Meetoo, a flash web site is being used to offer an “e-version” of the newspaper.
Who would damn care about viewing a ‘real” format version of the newspaper, which takes ages to load and not practical at all to view in a computer screen?
Adverts à gogo!
If you succeed in surfing on the new web site, you may find something very annoying… the adverts!
I don’t understand why they have included so much adverts on the site, on the first day itself… Money? It seems the most logical answer…
I myself have been online since more than 2 years now, and I never considered putting adverts on my blog, not yet…
Amateurism!
Check out the picture that they included on this page!
I will be ashamed to put that, even on my personal web site!
Maintenance en cours
Since a few minutes(around 730pm MRU time), it seems that the technical team has decided to shut down the site (or part) by putting a maintenance notice, as below.
Future of Mauritian Bloggers?
I fear that l’express.mu and La Sentinelle group may blacklist myself and other bloggers for writing about this failure regarding the planification and deployment of their new web 2.0 site, but they should keep in mind that just as journalists are here to report incidents, bloggers are not so different 😛
I sincerely hope that l’express.mu will reconsider their web site, and the whole process of planification, testing and deployment, and why not, change their development company?
Dont forget, DCDM Consulting is here 🙂
Cheers for blogging!
Yashvinblogs 
LoL..I have no more words to add..
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What Web 2.0???
That’s not web 2.0… that’s web 0.2!!!! 😛
Is it in maintenance??
Try http://www.lexpress.mu/Default.aspx –> It’s not! 😛
I’ve just started searching for Easter eggs… Check Avinash’s post comments later for one of them… 🙂
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:p lack of professionalism to set debug mode on in any framework in a production environment :p.
didn’t think others would notice that.
anywayz, could be the big boss was forcing the developers to rush things .. there are bosses who just don’t listen to what developers say..lol ou bien kapav developers la meme…..
enfin… we don’t want to flame.
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OOooooohhhhHHH So Crap. The new site.
Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.
Exception Details: System.Data.SqlClient.SqlException: Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.
Source Error:
Line 33: catch (Exception ex)
Line 34: {
Line 35: throw ex;
Line 36:
Line 37: }
Source File: e:\inetpub\wwwroot\lexpress\App_Code\connection.cs Line: 35
All technie guys would know how to handle this. Buch of amateurs have surely been working on it. And what make me TVR is that they released a Test version on Production. hehe.
Most links or page tends to timr out. When I went on the site earlier today, the default page was just crashing.
OK. Lets talk about things other than technical issues.
1. So slow to load.
2. They followed the same trend as L’express Samedi. No news but only ads.
3. Outsourced their Web Site to Indians. hahaha. Surely the lowest bidder. There are millions of Indian companies out there and less than 1 percent of them do decent jobs.
4. Clearly a bunch of amateurs..
On a last note.. Dans tantebazar (Reference made to http://www.tantebazar.com on the concerned website header) gagne Fey Lisou (www.lexpress.mu)
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The footer of the website reads “Ce site est mieux vu avec Internet Explorer et une résolution 1024 x 768”.
What do they make of Firefox, the preferred browser of many of us. pfffff
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A new error has been logged :
Line 34: {
Line 35: //HttpContext.Current.Response.RedirectLocation = “maintenance.htm”;
Line 36: throw ex.Message;
Line 37:
Line 38: }
Source File: e:\inetpub\wwwroot\lexpress\App_Code\connection.cs Line: 36
GROS TVR!
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I’m not doing much better either. Looks like they have some correction work to do!!
Server Error in ‘/’ Application.
Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.
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Geez…..X mas joke?
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As Avish has mentioned on his blog, they should have gone for a ready made script like Vivi CMS or something else which is fast and reliable, one thing that sucks is the server!, its damn slowwwww!!!!!
and not to mentioned, they are targeting to beat le defi media, as they were the first to launch a web 2.0 site will news always updated
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hmm password la zot pann gagne guettE kan ti p montrE ki? that was the biggest lol
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Ayo! Same here! TRied to see the most blogged apge but alas! the page constantly showed Page error!
Hope it’s going to be betetr soon!
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poof mne fatigué atan sa http://www.lexpress.mu/Default.aspx page la load…surement enkor lor maintenance mem 🙂
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Notes: The current error page you are seeing can be replaced by a custom error page by modifying the “defaultRedirect” attribute of the application’s configuration tag to point to a custom error page URL.
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revert back to common english words!!
c juste ke l’express ti bizin fer testing lor 1 group dimoune lerla lance li mai non zot in envie fer BANG le 1er December! zot ban programmer ek maintenance in gagne hyper bez!
prend exemple r yashvin avant li lance so new blog design li fer testing by me.
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L’inde la bezer meme sa… sameme ena ene tas software engineers vine depuis l’inde mais p balayer la rue dans canada… lol
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@Bhooks : the developers have also coded tante bazar with their feet, a real shame as I cited over here.
@Yashvin: yep I think the word is right: AMATEURISH.
BTW, this in no case is an attack, but the DCDM website does not reflect professional website building neither, there’s no content on the homepage really (when the code is analysed) and you can get a real laugh when you deactivate all CSS (use web developer toolbar in Firefox) and try to navigate the site.
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@Webdesign Bureau: Thnks for ur comment dear…
You mentioned, the DCDM Web site?
Just a little note, I dont work for DCDM but for DCDM Consulting…
Completely different thing….
btw I would like to know : For which reason would someone want to disable CSS in order to navigate in a web site?
Thnks for replying…
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Well, DCDM consulting’s website also follows the same trends, sorry for the mistake.
Disabling CSS is not the point actually but what CSS can do for you when properly coded and W3C norms followed.
People needing to disable CSS are most of the time visually impaired or blind persons using special browsers such as Lynx web browser. This makes a website accessible to those about whom we never think. In France it is even a law that has been voted to have all government/civil service websites accessible. When you disable the CSS, the idea is to have only content, clean and readable and semantically correct for these people. But does this benefit to these people only? No!
This benefits to the website itself. First, to increase a website’s load speed, you factorise your CSS in a seperate file which is loaded and cached once and for all. As such, when you go on another page, the CSS doesn’t have to be loaded again and the page called is only made of HTML and content, lightweight and fast. For example, if the L’Express website was built like this, setting aside the lag between server requests and response, it would have gained more than 5 seconds in page load time. This is also beneficial in a country like Mauritius where bandwidth is not readily available (§ Kurt Avish’s ordeal with Nomad).
When you look at indexing robots like Googlebot or Yahoo! Slurp, they don’t have eyes and don’t need to see the eye-candy of your beautiful site and therefore don’t want to waddle through the code. They just turn off the CSS. But what if you serve them code+content+CSS while they would gobble content+very lightweight code. This helps your indexation, gives priority to the content and there you are, you are doing organic SEO because you are optimising your pages without having to really change your code or doing exogenous actions.
If you have to print a web page, your printer usually tries to disable the CSS before printing. My own portfolio is based on this allowing you to disable the CSS and print the whole page as a simple page without being hassled by tabled layout page building conventions.
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@Webdesign Bureau:
You are giving me a lecture about CSS, good, but why to me?
You may agree that you are here referring about l’express site, which I dont like too 😛
As for the printable version, the sites which have content for printing, generally offer printable version pages, isn’t it?
You are talking so much about standards, so I just tried to validate your blog on w3c, and it happens that it can not even process your web site.
Anyway, I want to say that your comments are very much valuable, and keep visiting for sharing your thoughts!
Cheers mate!
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No, you might have mistaken me, I wasn’t trying to give a lecture. Sorry for that. Concerning printable versions, a lot of sites don’t offer it actually. Even with it many offer bad versions. I just tried the Validator and it does validate:
HTML
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sachin-db.com&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&group=0
CSS
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sachin-db.com&profile=css21&usermedium=all&warning=1&lang=fr
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@Webdesign Bureau: Thats nice then if it wasn’t a lecture for me 🙂
Na, not your site, but your blog… lol, nevermind…
Anyway, my blog doesnt validate either (lol) because of the loads of html coding here and there, together with the posts which are not so easy to keep according to w3c.
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Oook, well, I’ve never tried to validate the Webdesign Bureau just because I didn’t build it. My concerning my personal blog (http://blog.sachin-db.com), it is still on test run. The homepage validates, the internal pages do not validate because of a UTF-8 error coming from my comments template but I don’t have time to correct it for the time being. Anyways, it doesn’t really matter.
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for personal matters rente lor msn do.
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@Avishna: pa pe coz personal matters la 😀 ek mo pa servi MSN avek tou so ban espion ek publisiter.
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i cannot subscribe te its RSS feed.. i get the folowing message from google reader when i add this link(http://www.lexpress.mu/Services/RSS) to my subscription:
************************************
Feeds matching “http://www.lexpress.mu/Services/RSS”
Your search did not match any feeds.
Suggestions
* Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
* Try different keywords.
* Try more general keywords.
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can any body help me pls.. i got the link from the express website itself..
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