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Tinkering with the BTGDateline: 25th March, 2007When the BTG first went online in November 2001, it consisted of the content from what used to be the About.com British Theatre site, and I designed and edited it, as well as writing all the news, features and reviews (not that there were many of the latter!). The following year we were joined by Philip Fisher as London reviewer, and since then, like Topsy, we have "growed and growed". Now we have over thirty reviewers spread throughout the UK. Some are occasional but others are frequent contributors. In addition we have correspondents in the Midlands and the North West - indeed, we now have a NW Editor (David Chadderton) because the number of reviewers in that region has grown - and Philip is now our London Editor, with a team of getting on towards ten reviewers. When we began, we got our news items through personal contacts within the theatre world or by trawling all the news sources available online and in print: now we receive hundreds of press releases a week from across the country. In our first full week online, we had 1,899 page views: now we are averaging 100,000+ each week. But the way we get the site online has not changed at all in that time. Each and every review, news story or feature is sent to me and I edit it, find an appropriate illustration if the reviewer/correspondent hasn't sent one and resize it to fit, put it all into the template, update the relevant indices and upload everything by FTP to the server. At the weekend I change the front page, the recent reviews page, the recent news page and the latest page, and then write the Newsletter and send it out via Yahoo Groups. To be honest, it is becoming too much to handle, so I am looking at ways of simplifying the process. The first of this "tinkering with the BTG" starts this week. The recent reviews and recent news pages are being combined into one, with a slightly different content (just the previous week's reviews and news stories rather than the last two weeks'). This has saved two hours - quite remarkable! Over a year that means over 100 hours saved. We are looking at other ways of lightening the load - a change, possibly, to the front page - but the one thing we don't want to do is reduce visitors' access to the archived material - there are, for example, 173 RSC and 122 National Theatre-related news stories in the post-2001 index and more prior to that date archived. Currently there are somewhere in the region of 8,000 pages online, an archive that goes back to 1997 when the About.com site started. So you'll be seeing changes to the BTG in the coming weeks and months, but they will not reduce the site's functionality - they'll just make my life a bit easier! Peter Lathan
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