Oh, good. It’s not just us.

Seeing the reports today on the technical problems on the New York Times Web site reminded me that I forgot to write an explanation for our own little outage that took place Tuesday morning. The few people who care probably have already forgotten about it, but in the interest of transparency, here’s what happened.

Early risers coming to spokesmanreview.com early Tuesday noticed the framework for the site and a lead story about Dick Cheney’s visit, but nothing else. The news from the Tuesday paper began showing up gradually beginning at about 8 a.m., and the site was back to its old chipper self by about 9.

Content from the print newspaper is posted automatically overnight - our front-end system (where stories are databased and pages are produced) exports the stories, and that data is sorted and posted via a series of scripts that run on a server (a similar process posts, among other things, the AP headlines you see on the right side of the home page). The stories were queued up and ready to go, but a security update on the server, for whatever reason, prevented the scripts that post the stories from running.

It wasn’t until I arrived at the office, saw the site was blank, had a heart attack, and ran back to the servers to re-run the scripts (in that order) that the news started popping up (Why didn’t anyone notice sooner? Dirty little secret: I still prefer to read the old-fashioned printed newspaper first thing in the morning).