Long story, short: The Villawire is broken and I’d put the chances of it being fixed only marginally ahead of Birmingham City’s chance of promotion.

Apologies to those who were still using it, and I know there were a few, I did what I could to avoid it, but in the longer term its demise was inevitable in any case.

Most of the same sources are available on the home page here, but the format is different and all links do expire in a day or two. I know the newsblock format is what visitors liked about the Villawire, but that’s not something I can replicate right now.

Longer story, longer: It must be ten years ago now that I launched the Villawire. There or thereabouts. Aside from some presentation changes, there’s been no development in those years and it was starting to show. More importantly, it had become a security risk.

The platform this site runs on, WordPress, has been introducing some major updates lately that require programming language on the server to be upgraded. Firstly to a slightly newer version, but soon enough to the latest version.

I’ve been testing things out on a development server lately and found the newest version killed the Villawire dead in tracks, but it also broke some other functionality, albeit in a less terminal fashion. So I tried the more intermediate version, a short term solution, and everything looked to be OK.

Today I got around to implementing that intermediate upgrade on the live server and everything looked OK. And then I checked the Villawire and it was a page of error codes as long as your arm. Honestly, I don’t know where to begin, but I don’t really have the time even if I did.

Knowing that the time is coming in any case, it’s probably as good a time as any to let it go and move on. Ten years ain’t a bad run on this here interwebs.

Thanks to everyone who visited over the years.

UTV