Site News: MAJOR overhaul of the News page!
By
Mike Tomkins
(Wednesday, February 7, 2001 - 15:42 EST)
In response to the ever-increasing flow of news, and the fact that our news archives are now getting into the region of 1/2 a megabyte of text each month, we've completely overhauled our news system just in time for PMA! The main change is that we now post a summary of each news item on the news page, and provide the full news item on its own separate page. This change is designed to keep load times down, and ensure that you're only spending time downloading the items you want to read...
Another big change is that, as well as linking to the source of our news items, we are now storing the original press releases alongside each item where appropriate. This alleviates a problem we've long faced - that sites such as Yahoo! BizWire and the like only archive press releases for a short period of time. We've also updated our 'My Netscape' channel, which now lists article summaries under each news headline...
We've been running the new system alongside the old one in a private test for the last week or so, and think we've ironed out the majority of the problems... If any bugs do creep in, please let us know! We also welcome feedback on the new design, and have more changes on the way... We're planning to provide 'previous/next news item' links on the individual items, so that you won't have to return to the news index between items, and are also working on a complete revamp of the news forum software to work with our new system, amongst other changes on the way!
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