WINA has a new website but, sadly, it represents a big step back for a station that was once a local on-line pioneer. The only obvious improvements are that it’s a little prettier and there’s a hint at future podcasting (though the restoration of streaming, which they once offered, would be good).
There are three big problems. First, all old links to their news are broken, rendering every link on the web to every WINA story useless, leading to an ugly 404. Second, there is no way to link to any story on the website now — there’s not a unique page for every story any more, not even an anchor. Third, not only have the old archives disappeared, but there is no archive of the news being added on the new site. The result is that their stories can’t be linked to, and they’ve essentially excused themselves from participating in the web. I guess I’ll have to wait for other media outlets to carry stories and write ’em up then, since I can’t link to WINA’s site.
Amazingly, there’s still no RSS feed, something that I can’t really fathom. Any news outlet without a subscription mechanism (RSS, RDF, Atom, whatever) is stuck in the mid-90s. I don’t know why they’d put a penny into altering their website without starting with a feed. So I’ve modified my screen-scraped RSS feed to work with their new code base.
Maybe they’ll go back to their old site. This one sucks. If you agree, you should vote in the poll on their sidebar and tell ’em it’s no good.
03/09 Update: WINA tells me that the site’s not done — it’s a work in progress. Keep your fingers crossed that all of these things will be fixed.
Re: RSS, they can’t claim ignorance since they scrape Yahoo’s weather.
Also it’s PHP (okay) but tables-based (ick) with an embedded style sheet.
Someone doesn’t get it.
I’m definitely happy to see the use of PHP. But, yeah, table-based layout? Embedded CSS? It’d be one thing if WINA staff had assembled this in house, but the site is credited to a website developer. How remarkable that a professional website developer would think that this is up to snuff.
One thing all the local radio stations DO NOT do but really NEED TO DO is to offer their broadcasts streaming on the web. Every once and a while there will be something I know I’d like to listen too, but because of where I live I can’t get the signal. Frankly I was surprised that none of the local stations did that. And I’m more likely to listen to the radio while I’m at my computer (at work or home) than any other place so to me the two just go hand in had.
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Oh, I almost forgot the site’s terrible new URLs. The page addresses have become completely meaningless. It’s impossible to look at a URL and have any idea of what you’re looking at. Compare to the URL of this very page — at a glance, it’s obvious that it’s a story about a new WINA website posted on March 8, 2006.
Waldo wrote:
I still want “Live web streaming.” :)