shit… the newswire’s down
When your newswire host goes down, you need a back up plan. Diigo, my social bookmarking tool of choice, will be down for 3-5 hours today. That means no newswire on my blog.
All you get is a horrible looking RSS error. In addition, I can’t post to Diigo using the Diigolet. My newswire is effectively out for the best part of a day. Or is it?
One of the reasons I use Diigo is that it allows me to send links to Delicious and to Twitter and other places if needed. The idea being, if one service goes down I can replace the dead feed with an alternative and the newswire is back up and running in a couple of minutes.
This minor hiccup to my morning reminded me of a conversation I had at the BBC Social Media Summit with an Editor at a well-known UK newspaper about the importance of choosing the right combination of third party tools,
“It’s very important to consider which tools you can safely outsource to someone else and which ones you have to be in control of. It’s crucial to get the underlying architecture right - you don’t want to have to rebuild.” link
It is key for the self-publisher to understand the tools being used. You have to understand how you are publishing and where. So that, when things go tits up, you know exactly what to do.
