This year the Formula 1 season has been drawn out until the end of November, which while brilliantly offering fans ever more track action, has cut into our off-season development time. To that end we've cheekily stolen a few weeks back from calendar organisers and begun tearing this site to pieces in anticipation of the 2012 season. The first noticeable change to take effect is the archival of the recently retired Daily posts.

Back in September the long running and always fabulous series came to an end, freeing us up some time to work on new things. Comments on daily posts had provided us with many challenges during their time in the spotlight, but the challenges didn't stop when the posts did. To that end, the brand new daily post archive solves a number of issues that have been causing a few headaches. Namely reducing the size of the site's primary database, and better separating content to make searching easier.

Unknown quantity

During the three years Daily posts were being created, 36 authors contributed to create 1,044 posts which accumulated a massive 649,036 comments from readers!

Such a quantity of collected content is enough to slow down a small site, especially one operating on an infinitesimally small budget such as Sidepodcast is. By archiving all of the content to a secondary location we've made Sidepodcast faster and easier to maintain, as well as reduced things such as the size of nightly backups and recovery time should a disaster occur.

Search me

Sometime during the past year, we excluded daily content and comments from this site's search facility, because we found the depth and breadth of elements that surrounded daily posts, had swamped the rest of the site and we simply couldn't find anything anymore.

The new archive allows us to separate searches, so all of the text across both domains is now indexable and the wealth of daily content doesn't consume other things you might want to find here.

The move has been done in a way that ensures old links redirect accordingly and nothing breaks, the change should be a seamless process. There are a few more styling tweaks to be made to the new archive, but you are welcome to look back on some truly classic posts and comments right now.

Enjoy the Sidepodcast Daily archive

We again must thank everyone who took time and effort to write posts and contribute comments during such an enlightening and rewarding period. Next job on our list is to provide something similar for the wiki's temporary home. Look for more changes to the site in the coming weeks, just as soon as we get that final race out of the way.