Slippage

 
Published on 2006-06-09 by John Collins.

Once again I have missed a deadline with the upgrade, mainly due to travel and sporting commitments this month really eating into my time. I will return to actively developing for this website today, and you will be happy to note that I have some new content ready for the site re-launch.

And when will the re-launch be? Well the best that I can say is soon, that is within a matter of weeks.

Traffic to this site has dropped off considerably in the last month or so. The lack of regular updates to the site recently might account for this, combined with my lack of active promotional activities due to concentrating on the re-design to the detriment of the live site.

The easing off of traffic to this site right now presents a good time to do the actual switch from the old system to the new one. I will be expecting a huge increase in the amount of 404 errors after the new system is launched due to the change in URLs, as many links exist online which point directly to individual articles on this site. When the re-launch takes place unfortunately all of these links will be broken.

The search engines will also take a while to re-index all of the content on this site with their bots, so I will be expecting the custom 404 error page to be the most popular page on the site for a few months after re-launch.

While all of this broken linkage is highly regrettable I believe that it is a necessary step to enable this website to mature into a more maintainable system, which should allow the content to grow in a more stable, less hap-hazard way.


Updated 2021 : note that the above post is out-of-date, given this post was originally published in 2006, but is left here for archival purposes.