Friday May 4 Seth and the website

Primo hired some kid to do his website. "He's running for office himself," Primo said. "He's about to graduate from high school."

I shook my head. "That's the best your side has?"

"He did a decent job on Jack's political website," Primo said.

I got the password and took a look at the site. "This is crap," I announced to Primo. "You need to let me do this. He hasn't done anything good and he's done a lot of bad things. I looked at Jack's site and it's crap, too. He has hotlinks that don't go anywhere and he left in stuff from the template that doesn't belong."

"Fine," Primo said. "You take care of it."

A few days later, Primo said, "Seth went off on facebook, calling one of our guys a union thug."

"If the shoe fits," I said.

"Yeah, but that's poor form," he said. "Maybe it's not such a good thing to have him working on my website. He seems to be a loose cannon."

"I need to get some information from him," I said. "Don't do anything yet."

I had not been able to figure out how to load a photo on the front page. This was in Wordpress, which I did not know so well. I finally sent an email to Seth asking him how to do it.

I didn't hear back from him for a few days. In the meantime, I figured it out for myself.

"Seth sent me a message on facebook," Primo said. "He's looking for a job. Look at this spelling and grammar."

I looked. It was pretty bad.

"This is not someone I would rush to endorse," I said.

Finally, I got an email from Seth:

I've set the website live. You can upload a photo via the Slider option on the left hand side of the website.

What? He hadn't even looked at it or he would know that I had put the photo in. Plus, the site was not ready to go live! It had almost no content! Who sets a website live without at least looking at it and definitely without getting permission from the owner?

I checked the site. It wasn't live. It didn't look live in my browser.

Now I know that browsers don't always show current stuff - sometimes they are lazy and show cached, not-live versions.

Instead of replying with an angry, "No! Do not set this site live! It is not ready!" I just emailed back that I had taken care of things. The "You're a complete idiot" was implied.

Two days later, Primo said, "Samantha says my website is live. What's going on?"

We investigated. It was live indeed. Well crap. A live website that had almost no information except for some dummy copy that I had put in when I created the various tabs.

Primo was not happy. "You should have been on top of this," he said.

Insert huge fight here about how is Primo supposed to do things if he can't trust the people he's delegating to. Only I couldn't fight back very hard because Primo was right. I had dropped the ball.

I set the status back to "under construction."

"Change the password," he said. "I don't want Seth involved in this at all. I'm scared he might do something destructive. Jack wants you to change the password on his, too."