Archiving parts of Planet Bods
Published on 5 August 2010 in Planet Bods, Planet Bods, web development
For the last few months we’ve been evaluating Planet Bods and how we look to work for the future. As such, we’re here today to announce the results of the Planet Bods Strategy Review.
I won’t lie to you – these are difficult times. Some people will inevitably lose their jobs. Other roles will be moved to Salford. We’ve had to make some difficult decisions, however we firmly believe that the savings we make can be re-invested back into Planet Bods and make it a leaner, more efficient operation.
The headlines are as follows.
We will close 25% of top level directories on Planet Bods, and close down Planet Bods 6Radio and the Planet Bods Asian Station…
And that’s how I would be starting this post if this website was a huge media enterprise and I was addressing several thousand staff. But as it happens this website is just me, there is no Planet Bods 6Radio or Asian Station, and I can’t be bothered with arbitrary figures like 25% when there’s less then ten top level directories on this website as it is.
However I have been doing a process that’s kind of similar, but far smaller, than what the BBC’s going through with it’s web presence.
It’s now been thirteen and a half years since I launched my website. It was a different world back then. Commercial sites were often lacklustre. There were no blogs. The personal home page was king.
Ah, the personal homepage. You don’t get many of them any more. Indeed I saw one recently and was just amazed. Over the last few years, the websites of individuals have tended to consist almost entirely of blogs, whilst someone looking for information a person or topic is more likely just to go to Wikipedia than search the net.
Sites you make yourself about your interests and hobbies – a motley collection of your own Star Trek site, fan page for Britney Spears, or whatever – have in some ways disappeared.
The change coincided with the some of the early web pioneers getting bored, or having a family and being too busy. I started a website when I was a student and as such, had loads of time. Time I should have been doing my coursework usually, but time none the less. Now I work a 35 hour week, spend 10 hours of my week commuting and often just get home and want to slump in front of the TV and not think.
Trouble is, this website hasn’t really changed hugely to take into account all that. There’s all manner of content I put up ago that’s diligently sat there for years. And years. And years. A lot of it is older than my blog – and that started in 2002. Now some content is fine like that. But other stuff hasn’t had the attention nor love it deserves and needs.
Working out what to do with it all has been a question I’ve been wondering for about two years. I even toyed with back porting it into my blog at one point and leaving it at that!
Eventually I decided on taking a good, cold hard look at the site and come up with a new policy.
As such over the last few months I’ve been going through a plethora of pages on the site and archiving several areas. The kind of stuff that has become rather irrelevant, that I just can’t do justice too, or where the web has just changed.
So I’ve taken the decision to start officially archiving some sections of this site, removing them from the homepage and putting on a banner explaining the page is no longer updated, complete with a nice help page.
If you want to know a good reason why sometimes you have to close things down, well one such archived page is The Wise and Sage Words of Tim Westwood for example. Radio 1 DJ Westwood doesn’t half come out with some mad stuff, so I started a site to quote some of it.
Trouble is, to do a site like that you need good, hard exposure to Tim Westwood and I didn’t have that. And then Twitter turned up, and to be honest, Westwood does frankly a far better job of satirising himself there than I ever could here! I mean, how can I compete with such gems as…
Its 5am can’t sleep – keep dreaming of serato crates. Worrying about them crates. Gotta open the laptop.
Some things are frankly impossible to beat…