Yesterday morning, we received several reports that the library website wasn’t functioning properly — there were missing menus and scary error messages. No one on our team had made any changes to the site, though — so what happened?
Well, over in another part of the university, the server that hosts the university calendar system went offline. The library website pulls our events lists from this system every time you visit a library homepage. So, when the library website tried to find the events lists, there was nothing there…so the library website said, STOP! I cannot do anything else until I find the events! (not unlike my 2-year-old kid 😅), and it stopped loading the page midway-through.
Once we identified the issue, we removed all events boxes as a temporary measure. Later in the day, we were able to put in a code fix that tells the library website to keep on going, even if it doesn’t find any events. (Ditto Recent Library News items, which pulls from the Library News Online site.)
Even better, we were able to share our solution with the university’s web department, who then implemented the fix in the main university website. More stable sites for all!