The saying goes that if you love law and/or sausages, you should watch neither being made. In my experience, you should add magazines to that list.
Getting any given issue to the printer is a messy business. No matter how carefully you plan your work processes or how efficient your staff is, something is going to go wrong at the last minute. A story will be too long or too short for the space allotted. A last-minute ad will come in (good for the bottom line; not so good for the editorial and production folks who have to rearrange the layout to get it in). A picture will be unusable or, at the last minute, someone will catch an error in a drawing that has to be fixed (another good thing that messes up the tightly tuned schedule.)
Now coordinate this process with a Web site that is updated at least once a day and sometimes more, and things can get really crazy. Katherine Bonfante, our digital managing editor is a master of this coordination, but even she can't always get everything to come out even so that Control Global presents a totally seamless face to our users.
Between the time we sent our September issue to the printer and now, when it's up on the site, we have made some internal structural changes to some of our software that unintentionally may cause some confusion. Our "Feedback" column this month reproduces some of the dialog generated by Walt's post of August 10, "Security and Safety with Blood and Guts." At the time we sent the issue to the printer, the best we could do for print readers was direct them to the August 10 post for the complete dialog. That meant scrolling through several back pages of posts to get to the correct one.
In the meantime, we've upgraded our blogging software so now every post has a "permalink" shown at the bottom of the page. What this gives you is a direct link to each individual post, making it easy to send the link to others, embed it in your own documents or bookmark it.
We hope this and other improvements we're working on for our "Community" section on ControlGlobal will make things easier for you. We' want you to experience only the tasty sausage at the end of the process and not all the mess that comes before.
