First Iteration of Techrights as 100% Static Pages Web Site
OVER the past year, the past month, and even just more than a week ago I openly expressed concerns that news was drying up. That's not to say nothing was being published; but what was getting published was either scarce, of low quality, or both. Considering the closure of many newsrooms, and some of them desperately resorting to chatbots, this was hardly surprising and we could not expect it to improve over time, only to deteriorate further.
About a month ago we planned for this and other sites to reassess ways to find news; it was the lifeblood because we rely on stories to form new stories and we also syndicate stories in bulk.
Moving to a new server and making a static archive of old stories was not surprising, only a bit abrupt. It was long in the making or long overdue (years). We've just uploaded a preliminary iteration of conversions of the old site (no more WordPress, no more databases), so the number of 404s (page not found) should decrease by a lot.
Since the upgrade we've published a lot of news stories and we intend to keep the pace this high if not higher. This won't be easy because of a lack of news (checking all the known Linux news sites these days does not take long), but we'll try our best.
The migration took a lot less time than we initially expected. We envisioned it would take weeks, not days, but we still have work ahead, addressing all sort of niggles and imperfections. We also wish to get the bulletins going again. That may take time, as the workflows changed and code thus needs to be rewritten.
Techrights has a very long tradition and strong name recognition. People who have followed us since the early days of Digg (2006) know what we've accomplished. We want to champion another decade or two of positive impact and opinionated analysis. █