The Daily Progress has a new website, and it’s a big improvement for them. It looks like they’ve abandoned the beastly, totally insecure old content management system that they were using. Articles now have big-boy URLs. At long, long, long last, they have RSS feeds. Stories have tags. The search engine works. There appear to be lots of new features like integrated video, photo galleries, audio, etc. So the good news is very good.
But the bad news is very bad. Their archives are gone. Years of news have simply disappeared. Every link to every Daily Progress article from cvillenews.com (and anywhere else) 404s, even links from just this morning. (WINA used to have a mind-blowingly great site, because they had news stories going back over a decade; it was a treasure trove. That all disappeared two years ago, apparently forever.) The RSS feed exists only in the abstract — it doesn’t actually work, and the fact that the layout has changed drastically means that my screen-scraped RSS feed is broken. So those of y’all who, like me, read the Progress primarily via RSS are out of luck.
The feed should be easily fixable, but the loss of the archives is a real bummer. There’s just no need to lose all of these articles when upgrading to a new CMS. The improvements, though, are great, and I’m impressed. For more about the changes, see the article by the paper’s web guy, Matt Rosenberg.
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