Dead air in Des Moines

MARCH 31, 2003, 12:55 am

Don’t you love it when your site’s home page is blank?

The only text on desmoines.com is an Active Server Pages error message: Active Server Pages error 'ASP 0126', Include file not found, /desmoines.asp, line 97, The include file 'iowacom/poll/poll.asp' was not found.

Desmoines.com has been like this for 15 minutes since I first saw it, and possibly a lot longer. Whoops.

Correction April 10, 2003 4:05 am: The Des Moines Register’s site is actually at DesMoinesRegister.com, not Desmoines.com. Note to self: The links in Joe Grimm’s top 100 list are just too old to be useful anymore. Whoever owns Desmoines.com should still be embarrassed, but apparently it isn’t a news site.

Comment by Adrian, posted March 31, 2003, 2:09 am

Hmmm. Still down.

This is inexcusable -- and a good example of lousy error reporting. A simple message like "This site is temporarily unavailable" would be a vast improvement.

Comment by Brendan, posted April 1, 2003, 10:24 am

Now really, Nathan, why in God's name were you visiting the Des Moines news site? I think you and about seven Iowans truly missed not having the latest Des Moines headlines. Still, pretty inexcusable. Even amateur sites have better error messages built in.

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