[LINK] SMH has stopped delivering text-display

Roger Clarke Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au
Wed Mar 9 09:40:14 AEDT 2011


The Sydney Morning Herald has had an increasingly ghastly home-page 
(slow load-times because of the vast syndication and excessive 
images, continual interruptions and re-positioning because of 
frequent refreshes, and image completely dominating substance).

For us curmudgeons, it's always provided a text-only alternative:
http://www.smh.com.au/text/

But it's recently stopped posting articles under the National and 
World categories.  I can't see any way to get to the text of an 
article without going through the horrible home-page, and browsing or 
searching from there.

The Age site (unsurprisingly) is the same.

Does anyone know anyone on the Fairfax web-team?


Aside:

I checked how discoverable articles were using Google News.

It seems the <site:au> qualifier (same as <h:au>) is malfunctioning.

It returns zero hits whereas omitting it returns lots of Australian hits.

It still works on the unconstrained Google search-engine.

Well, okay, this is Google we're talking about:
Bugs ain't bugs;  they're features.


-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/

Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
                    Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916
mailto:Roger.Clarke at xamax.com.au                http://www.xamax.com.au/

Visiting Professor in the Cyberspace Law & Policy Centre      Uni of NSW
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University



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