h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Do you recall the last announcement (F21546918?thread=8291881) in which we apologized for the recent service disruptions, explained Ripley is buckling under the strain of working well beyond its specs, and revealed our Technical Team has been working hard on a solution since h2g2 moved to Not Panicking Ltd?

The solution – Pliny - is almost here. The Tech Team expects to launch Pliny the first weekend of May. Pliny will bring these changes:

a) A beautiful user interface, with dolphins, will give Researchers and Readers alike the ability to share links to entries they enjoy on Twitter, Facebook and G+.

b) An easy-to-use text editor will make writing up your research simple and more enjoyable.

c) Modern memory management under the hood will provide h2g2 the stability it needs to serve its large Readership the information about Life, the Universe and Everything found in its large and growing Edited Guide and Post archives.

d) The ability to place advertisements and sponsorships will allow h2g2 to earn the money it needs to support itself and expand.

Keep your handy, and watch this space for more details.


Happy Nerd
h2g2 Comms Team

Thanks for letting us know

(*provides and s for tech team*)

is excited.

Every bit of that announcement makes me .

Excellent, and exciting news.

glad to hear it , but wonder if the servers will be offline long during the transformation.

Ooh, exciting.

That capitalisation of Readers is interesting though - how do you define it? Is it everyone who visits that site, however briefly? Or something else?

Oh, and does this new interface mean the end of the skins? And will it have the breadth of functionality that we have come to know and love?


Geggs

Questions, questions, questions...

So, answers?

We won't be losing the older skins. Seriously, you can take Goo away from me when you prise the code base out of your cold dead hands. Note the "your" not "my"

Pliny is a much more easy to read skin, but we're keeping the h2g2 we all know and love to run along side this. But we need something to take the strain of the general readership so that our forum lurking can continue in peace

But what acutally *is* Pliny? Well, I can tell you what it's not. It's not Barlesque. We know that because we took Barlesque, ripped out the dodgy BBC shoe-horn code, filled the missing gaps with new code, patched over the bugs and added new functionality. It doesn't *yet* have the full functionality of the older skins, but it will. It does also though have some new features that the older skins don't have, which you'll hopefully see in a few weeks time.

What we're launching, as you might have guessed, is just the first step in breathing new life into the Guide. We have plans, and we have code. We hope you'll like it

Yay!

I'll tell you the problem with Barlesque: it didn't require any discipline to attain it. The BBC just read what others had done, and then took the next step. They didn't earn the knowledge for themselves, so they didn't take any responsibility for it. They stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as they could, and before they even knew what they had, they, they patented it, and packaged it, they slapped it on a plastic lunchbox of a server, and then [pounds table with fists]they sold it.

That reminds me 603, we need to meet for a beer to go through the newer layouts to see what easy changes we can make

I'm free all next week, except for Thursday when I'll be at a poetry thing in the Nag's Head.

I feel bad for the company that was tasked with designing barlesque. Those guys went all out to make something nice, but they had an impossible task to perform. They had to design something aesthetically pleasing and user friendly around a hodge-podge of legacy requirements with various parts broken (or severely bent), for use by an entrenched, fragmented, diverse and opinionated group of users accustomed to 4 rather diverse interfaces. Then in the middle of their work, the BBC decides to 'dispose' of the site they're trying to fix. They came in with high ambitions but I highly doubt Barlesque will be featured on their company webpage or in their C.V.s.

Amen to that, BG. Paul and the team seemed like great people (heck, they even made h2g2 accounts and talked to us!) but they were faced with an impossible task.

All hail Pliny!

All hail Pliny!


...so long as I can still use the one and only true Goo Blue, I hears ya, Sista!

So, can we assume there will eventually be two iterations of Pliny, possibly incorporating references to their chronological order in their designations?

and this is worrying


b) An easy-to-use text editor will make writing up your research simple and more enjoyable.


christ i'm just getting the hang........... of anything




RJR just hoping it ain't fixed to much

'fraid not. The next incarnation of The Guide is already in pre-development, and is named Eddie

Just in case anyone is in any doubt, Pliny is Barlesque with the bugs taken out.

In the Pliny system, you can write in the easy-to-use text editor, which can do things like bolding text and blockquotes, or if you know GuideML you can continue to use it.

The old system with the three classic skins will be available for some time to come, complete with system crashes, pages not found and so on. Hopefully when we're happy that Pliny is 100% satisfactory we can move the Readers onto it, and that should ease the load on the old Brunel, Alabaster and Goo servers so the crashes may be less.

Crashes are not what worry me. Pliny evokes intimations of Vesuvius.