It had to happen, especially when you are working your way through school and volunteering and perhaps too tired to pay strict enough attention to detail: someone’s name gets misspelled.

It’s not right and should be corrected, but it’s especially wrong when it’s one of the KEYNOTES of the conference, and you’ve just launched a major media campaign to alert every homosexual in North America to go to your website and learn about said keynote.

My main collaborator is a woman who has never used WordPress, she’s bottomlining the Outreach/Press Release end of the Media team, and she got the email from the Keynote first and alerted me, who was trapped at my desk at work without recourse: what happened next is that she like a total I-can-figure-this-out badass looked up the WP log-ins on the shared Google Doc we have all our log-ins on [agility over security!], navigated to the post where the offending typing occurred, and copied in corrected text.

And somehow, broke the site.

Not totally destroyed, but all the sidebars were pushed out to the bottom of the posts. I noticed this when I went in a small panic to see if I’d misspelled it anywhere else [I had].

Pedagogy Theory Question: how do you tell someone their brave first attempt at a new technology kind of broke something?

My answer: Figure out what they did [somehow copied in extra <div>s though still not sure from where] and decide that explaining over email what happened is less important or agile than letting them feel like they can fix errors on the site quickly and effectively. I opted for a “silent fix.” I feel this is an everyone-wins solution.