5 February (Part 1) - It’s Bonkers
Readers who looked at the website yesterday and found it gone deserve an explanation
of what is going on, or at least a partial one.
Bonkers is ten years old and has grown far too big. Even though redundant pages have been progressively
weeded out there are close to 40,000 files and very nearly
100,000 hyperlinks, It may be a conservative estimate because the Menu is a
separate entity and the file counter excludes pages linked only from the Menu.
On top of that there are 30,000 images and that is after deleting a great chunk
of them last year and again recently.
The site is hand coded, no Wordpress or anything like that so the housekeeping
tools are primitive. I can no longer keep on top of it and it is time to start again.
I might also add that with increasing age and having lost my original team of
helpers I frequently lack the energy and enthusiasm to follow up leads and attend meetings.
(Nearly 77 and generally flu ridden in case you are wondering.)
For the future Bonkers probably will not die completely but I expect Council
meetings will more often be reported from the Webcast - when it works properly - rather
than driving to the Civic Offices and very occasionally running the gauntlet of
people I would rather not. In the streets, not in the Civic Centre I hasten to add.
I also genuinely feel that Bexley Council has improved immeasurably, there are
things I don’t like but it must be five years since a Councillor
or Senior Officer became involved in something which was criminal and caused the
police to investigate and refer cases to the CPS.
Readers like scandal and while that was going on I could count on more than
10,000 unique visits per month to the site from Bexley people and far far more individual
repeat visits. With nothing very special going on those numbers are well down,
2,000 unique visits is not unknown in 2020. One wonders whether it is worth the
effort but I do get a huge amount of encouragement to continue from the loyal few.
One thing that surprises me is that when I indulge in wildly off topic
subjects and perhaps rant about something or other the number of visitors goes up so I
may do more of that sort of thing when Bexley news is thin on the ground.
You will have probably noticed that the Menu is now much smaller than before. Every page sources its Menu from
the same file so they are all identical except for the Contact form pages which
are compiled from a commercial package which is not fully compatible with the
main Menu system. It is a pain to construct separately and it will not be updated in line
with the gradually expanding Main menu until the latter becomes stable.
The banner icons which allowed quick access to blogs, Today, Month and the
rather obscure Any Day will be restored as soon as possible but until then the
Menu is the main navigation point
As you should notice - well you are here! - the 2020 blogs are restored but any
references back to previous years will fail because those earlier blogs are not
on line at all, not even in some hidden form. If I ever find the time the
backward references will gradually be restored. but there are more than 5,000 to trawl through. Council meeting reports
will probably be the priority but many older blogs may never be seen again.
Finally because Bonkers was never designed to be a blog the main entry pages do
not directly access the blog pages. The tail wagged the dog of the original plan
and it has always annoyed me. I am not sure how yet but the plan is that
www.bexley-is-bonkers.co.uk
will display the latest blog page immediately. For a long time
www.bexley-is-bonkers.com always
has but almost no one uses it and it costs quite a lot of money to maintain!
So there it is. Thank you for your patience and I hope the occasional visit to
Bonkers will continue to be rewarding.