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.
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