This is a quick note to let you know that we have fixed what was apparently a long-standing issue we weren’t aware of until now.
As we work on things, different parts of the site do get randomly re-checked in the process. As we were updating something else, we noticed that our index page for music reviews was missing the release year of 1995. This was actually a surprise given that no one commented about this or noted us.
So, we looked into our backup files, sifting through everything to see when this release year disappeared. The worry for us was that there was somehow a security incident that went undetected or a glitch in the system that somehow deleted this chunk of the index. We basically dug back as far as we could and the release year was nowhere to be found.
Since we back up everything in multiple ways, we sifted through some alternative backups of the site. Eventually, we found out when this release year vanished. As it turns out when we upgraded the index pages back in 2018, the release year somehow managed to go missing in the process.
Before that point, the entire index was all placed in one page so you didn’t have to click through different pages to get what you wanted. However, as the list grew longer, it became more and more cumbersome. On the front end, you have this massive page that required a ridiculous amount of scrolling just to browse the index. To get a sense of this, you can check out the page in question on the WayBackMachine. On the back-end, WordPress and our browser were both really grinding just to insert text, code, and update. Something had to give and that is when we made the decision to split the entire list into different eras. We also coded it in such a way that allowed us to further split the list into single release years should the need arise without the need to completely rework the tree structure.
While this vastly improved things, somehow, we missed 1995 in the process. We’re not entirely sure how this happened, but it is clear that this was an oversight on our part. At any rate, we were able to restore the list and rebuild the URLs (had to be done manually, unfortunately). The index is now displaying properly. We did a quick spin through the other era’s and 1995 appears to have been the only release year we somehow missed. Problem fixed!
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Facebook.
