[Forced!] Site Reconstruction

This site is powered by WordPress. It’s a very popular platform which undoubtedly will be the engine behind very many of the sites you visit. WordPress provides the basic framework and is supported by a plethora of “plugins” – modules which add particular functions the site needs. Not every site wants to show pictures from random articles, for example, so rather than that functionality being built into the core programme, there are plugins which can be added to do that. There are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of different plugins to choose from, so every WordPress site is probably built slightly differently.

Why am I telling you this?

The key plugin on which this site was built has broken and won’t be fixed. The nature of the plugin is such that it’s not just a case of swapping it for a similar one or doing without entirely. Luckily the information itself – radio show details, for example – is unaffected. I just have to find new ways to retrieve and display it. I’ve therefore decided to take this opportunity to change how the site looks and works at the same time. Regular visitors will have noticed that the first step towards this has already happened. Regretably, this temporarily makes things worse rather than better while I work on new templates for how information is retrieved and presented. However, in the (hopefully not too) long term real benefits will become apparent, for example in being able to more quickly assemble the different snippets of information which make up a full radio show. This will significantly speed up the time it takes to display a page you want to look at.

Unfortunately, most of the information which is the main thrust of the site – show by show details for I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue and The News Quiz – can’t be displayed at the moment. It would take nearly as long to go through everything to put in temporary place-holders as it will to fix the fundamental problems, so I’m leaving the previous structure as it was and correcting it section by section. This means that for now the navigation links at the top of the page will lead you to some very strange looking pages which won’t be showing what you’ve gone there looking for.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible!