RXTV is back, but from a different place as a week that didn’t go to plan comes to an end.
First of all, apologies for the abrupt disappearance of the website on Monday 15th April.
RXTV is now in the process of transferring to new management and new hosting arrangements. But let me reassure you, I’m staying on and we’ll continue to follow the latest developments in broadcast and streaming TV platforms. Our news service will return in due course, but won’t be up to full capacity for a while while further changes take place.
Changes to the website are mostly about the back-end and are from an administrative point of view. (Yes, there are a few minor tweaks on your side of the website, and you may have already seen a sample of the minor changes.)
The move to a new hosting arrangement was meant to be a good opportunity to review all the content on the site and make a few changes to how this information is arranged and found in navigation as well as further changes behind the scenes.
Additionally, the old server and hosting arrangements no longer met the requirements of the site. The current arrangements were due to end anyway this summer.
This meant we had a few months to build the new site and review content on the old site ahead before inclusion on the new site, not just move it across in bulk, on a like-for-like basis. For example, there are some sections that have served their time and need to be revised or removed. And the way we store images needed to change. Over the course of a weekend in early June, the old website would then be replaced with the new rxtvinfo.com.
I said ‘was meant to be’. Things went awry after Easter, when we encountered an issue with our old server. Yes, complaints were made.
Sadly, as our hosting provider attempted to fix the server issues, things got worse. And estimated timeframes to fix the issue came and went. The service on the old server became unreliable, resulting in users seeing errors. Needless to say, complaints have been made.
A decision was made on Tuesday 16th April to direct you prematurely to our new webspace on our new server in order to retain an online presence, ahead of this weekend’s arrival of an ‘interim service’.
The server issues have thrown a spanner in the works of the original plan, as we didn’t really want to just transfer the old website over from one server to another.
As a result, some current content remains unavailable for now. Some older content will not reappear as it is out-of-date and would have been taken offline anyway by June. On the flipside, the revised RXTV homepage has made an unexpectedly early debut…
Later this year we’ll start making some further, gradual changes to the editorial content on the website as the new management arrangement kicks in. But that’s for a further update.
In the meantime, thank you for bearing with us.
Marc Thornham