[...] the one thing I'm not going to do is mess with the core functionality of CathInfo -- what all of us are here for -- which is reading and posting.
I
strongly agree that those are the proper priorities for CathInfo.
The Posts database is never touched. I want to have a complete collection of all posts going back to 2006.
I also
strongly agree with that priority.
I've long been amazed at the highly affluent or profitable organizational or corporate sites that think it's OK to delete articles or technical information that are unique sources for the content they provide, e.g.: local news-media coverage of local events that stimulate national--or international--interest, or earlier models or versions of a manufacturer's own computer hardware or software. Or fail to have a page-not-found handler that can retrieve an article after it's been moved from breaking-news or current articles into an archive. I'll accept a reasonable amount of extra time, if they need it: I remember archiving being routinely done on mainframes via reels of magnetic tape. So I'd be willing to wait; it sure beats being left with
nothing. Much of the time, the only essential content is the
text, which
uses far less space than a single one of the generic stock-photos or stock-illustrations that seems to be considered
necessary for decorating many Web-pages.
I'm
especially pleased that you have
not bought into the buzz-phrase "
integration with social media", whose practical impact, from sites that
have, is causing Web pages to take nearly forever to load, because they're contacting individual social-media sites to count 'likes' and display 'track-backs', regardless of whether an individual Web-surfer uses the social-media site, or
not, by querying multiple (
commercial-enterprise) servers that are wretchedly sluggish (whose performance might be neglected, perhaps, because they don't serve advertising and thus don't produce revenue, hmmm?).
So
thank you greatly for all your work in building CathInfo and keeping it running, all without displaying the dictatorial kind of attitude that you'd arguably be entitled to.