No, no, no, I didn’t just fire the entire staff, bring in an outside CEO and create an entire new layer of middle management! Actually, what we (me and Sol, the editor) did was created a bunch of new categories, deleted a bunch more, re-filed a bunch of links and are well on our way to making the categories much more robust and clear.
That has always been a problem with this site. Categories were always created in an “ad hoc” fashion, created on a whim, for the most part. Well, that time has past and now we are working on more structure employing a bit more (we hope) logic to the process.
For example, you’ll notice the HABITAT parent category. This will be for, well, I think the name says it all. And you may also notice that WEB RESOURCE is now gone. All of the links have been filed into more relevant categories and the category and all of the child categories have been deleted. SMALL BUSINESS is the next to be deleted. Everything there can be better filed into the new categories we’ve created, such as we’ve created ‘FOR SALE’ sub-categories for many of the main parent categories.
This will guide the user through the hierarchy with more clarity.
So, lots of thinking is finally being put to this particular aspect of the site, and its high-time that it has.
It has been a while since I’ve provided an updated status on various things, and since I find myself with a bit of time here at work, I might as well do so. Things have been going along quite well. Our editor has just been doing an amazing job at keeping links flowing into the system, coming up with ideas in not just making the site better for end users, but also making it easier to run (which has a direct effect on end users).
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Well, our fearless and tireless editor has finished The Great Purge. Here are some numbers for you. Prior to re-launching on May 22nd 2006, there were exaclty 18,811 links in the system.
As of Saturday, August 12 2006, there are 483 active links in the system.
That is almost a 99.9% turn over of the entire system.
We need links! I wouldn’t mind having 5,000 by the end of the year. Is it possible? Who knows. But we are going to do all we can to see this database re-populated, but we cannot do it ourselves (hehehe, turns out that we do, lol, need you after all!).
Well, I look at it this way. Of the links that are left, they are good quality links to sites and projects that are alive and well and that need your attention. The rest, well, sorry to see them go, but that’s the way it goes. If you had a link with us, and now you notice it gone. Please, add your latest URL, and keep on top of it. The only way we can help you is if you stay active. Tell your friends about us, we can only do so much on our own. Yeah this is DIY, which hey, grassroots is a huge part of this little project. Okay, I’ll stop begging now… but I’m not too proud to though, just so you know.
Oh yeah, and also drop our editor a note if you want. She put in an incredible effort.
Well, I couldn’t just go to sleep with a blaring error on the site. I went through the category (ZINES/PUNK) and went through and found the offending link. It was, as luck would have it, a dead link anyway. I deleted said link and now that category is working as expected. I believe I have an existing data validation that will trap any error like that with the new software I put in place (back in May) but this link was from 2001, and goes back to a time when there was little or no real data validation and meant that it was actually “broken” data. It happens when trying to use old data in a new system. When time permits I will still be looking at preventing this in the future but now that I know exactly what it is, its a low priority item (unless it crops up in other places, but our editor just spent the last several days going through every category and every link and has only found this to be occuring once).
There’s a major bug that we just found tonight, and I thought I had a fix, but I went and actually broke everything, so I had to back it out. So, if you are looking in ZINES/PUNK and see the error message, that is the bug. One of the links in that category (there are 9 of them) has a few illegal charaters that the XML parser is choking on. I tried wrapping the values in CDATA blocks but for some reason the PHP XML parser simply ignored that designation and spit out CDATA as the text and not just the “character data” it is supposed to.
So, this is something I’m going to have to look at and figure out the best fix. I can’t do that right now. It is quite late and I haven’t been feeling good all day, I need some sleep. For those of you who may have links there, sorry, I’ll get it straightened out as soon as I can. Your links are still visible through the search engine.
