Back from the Climate Change and Wine conference — it was a great experience. I’ve got epic notes (41 pages, urk!) and plan to distill them into something hopefully cohesive and post that later this week, time permitting.
Meanwhile, the build of the new database is crunching along nicely. If all goes well it should be complete within a couple of days, and then after some testing, I’ll put it live. In general, it’s got about 1000 new sites, and will be maybe 10% bigger than the previous database.
But at the same time there’s always some attrition. Some of this is natural; websites go up, websites disappear, websites change format. But what kills me is when some site “relaunches” and throws away a goldmine of great archive content, all because they’re either not aware of its value, or just can’t be bothered to make the old content work under the new site.
While putting together Able Grape I’ve seen this happen a few times, and sometimes it’s heartbreaking. I’d find some goldmine of information from a unique perspective, and get excited (yeah, I’m like that; sad, isn’t it?). I’d do a bunch of work to make sure that it got properly included and found in search results, instead of getting buried, as it might on a general-purpose search engine, and then boom! it disappears. Back to square one.
Read on if you’re interested in a couple of examples where you could help get the content back by writing to these publications!
Continue reading ‘Why does great content have to go away?’