Some words about our new site

Hello,

Welcome back to musicOMH, following our extended Christmas/January publishing hiatus.

Sorry if you’ve missed us – and thanks for the tweets and emails asking after us; these were very much appreciated.

If you’ve visited us before, you might notice that there have been some changes.

Actually that’s an understatement of some magnitude. We’ve rebuilt the site from scratch.

Some 13 years’ worth of content is now (mostly…) in a database for the first time. While some details have remained the same, how the site works has changed completely.

These changes were essential, for the old site had become completely unmanageable. We chose what is traditionally a relatively quiet period to set about this sizeable task.

We’ve continued to commission articles throughout the publishing hiatus. As of today you will find some 70 new articles, including many album reviews, that have appeared since we stopped updating the old site. Much more is set to follow.

What’s new?

We’re still (re)constructing sections; this is something of a work in progress. Our photo galleries are temporarily unavailable, as is the search facility and the classical index page (sorry…), but these will be back soon.

However, some very old content has not, and won’t, made the leap to this brave new world. And you will surely find some formatting errors in individual posts, if you’re looking. Additionally, social integration with all its attendant baubles isn’t *quite* ready, and, very sadly, Facebook comments from the old site are not being carried over.

As for the new, there is now a new music section, where you can find handpicked videos and audio embeds that catch the ears (or eyes) of the editing team and our contributors. And you can now find everything published about any artist we’ve ever covered on individual artist pages; find these linked at the base of articles. There will be an artist directory before very long, too, making finding articles that bit easier. And everything published by every contributor is now linked to from each contributor’s own page, which you can find by clicking on their name from any byline.

We’re also running a new comments system, Disqus, which is used by many other publishers. Comments to the old blog system have been imported into this.

It adds up, in summary, to a lot of change in a short period of time. Inevitably there will be teething problems and errors. If you spot problems or things that look rather out of place, we’d appreciate it if you’d let us know.

Votes of thanks

Sometimes, when doing a million things for little thanks and generally no financial gain, the people who help to make it all possible get less than the sumptuous recognition they deserve. If you’ll forgive the indulgence, I’d like to rectify that a little here.

It would not have been possible to get this far with this new site without the behind-the-scenes programming brilliance and nous of Tim Lee, who deserves praise beyond mere words for creating solutions to innumerable formerly insoluble problems and putting up with my gargantuan list of coding requests. Thank you, Tim.

Thanks also to our outgoing Features Editor Ben Hogwood for a decade’s worth of invaluable contributions, advice and friendship. His first article for musicOMH was published way back in 2003. I’d like to wish him well as he prepares to unleash his first book on the world.

I’d also like to welcome new Features Editor Laurence Green, who has already arranged a slew of new features.

Finally, I’d like to offer my thanks to Deputy Editor Daniel Paton and Live Editor Helen Clarke for their unstinting patience, friendship and support, without which this publication, and the editing of it, would be at the very least far less bearable.

On behalf of them, our contributors and myself, we hope you will continue to enjoy, and contribute to, musicOMH in 2013.Save