All the news that doesn't fit

In the past three-plus years since the birth of this very blog, it has grown. A lot.

While the scope, reach and influence of this here puppy has vastly expanded, so have parts that I would rather not have grown so much. You may remember a lot more stuff here, including a wide array of web links, directories and whatnot. You may also notice that some of that stuff is now gone.

For a while now, I've been expanding this thing to the limits of what a blog could reasonably do. From the schedule and streams listing on the left side of the page to listings of personalities, networks, stations, etc to reciprocal links and even syndicated feeds from other sites of note. Needless to say, this thing was becoming a bloated pig. And with that, the coding became chaotic, search engine spiders were having a tough time crawling the blog and it was becoming a chore for older systems to load. With the syndicated feeds, it was like loading five different sites at once! That's insane! Think of it as a parallel parking a Hummer near a college campus. Pretty crazy stuff. The last straw was a few days ago, when Blogger automatically reformatted this blog so that everything was shoved to the left side. Something had to be done.

Some have said that the amount of crap stuff on this blog would be enough to fill an encyclopedia. Well, now it is. Introducing LTRapedia! Yes, your favorite blog now has a companion Wiki! In it will be many of the features you have grown to love here, and some features from the past that sadly had to be discarded.

What will be on the new LTRapedia? Here's a few:

A comprehensive listing of all stations that air liberal/progressive talk programming, and other stations of note.

A key of what kinds of programming are aired on each station (a feature I sadly had to drop from here).

A comprehensive listing of show hosts and programs. This is a feature I had to discard here, since Blogger recoded it all and made a horrific mess of my blog.

A list of progressive-oriented podcasts.

Features devoted to noncommercial radio.

An intermingling of old blog entries from here mixed with the new wiki articles.

Individual articles on each station, personality, network, organization, and whatever else.

So you see, this is one ambitious puppy. Will it replace the blog? No, it won't. Everything else, including the latest news and features and some of the more popular items will remain as before. I've basically made most of the changes here that I plan on doing, and the result is a more streamlined and less bloated appearance. The schedule and stream list to the left will remain unchanged, since it is a very popular feature. Same with the station list. The reciprocal links will stay as well, as they help in being linked by other sites and blogs. And yes, the ads will stay. After all, the holiday season is coming.

As per the old saying about Rome not being built in a day, neither is this wiki. There's still a lot of unpacking to do, and as a result, I have temporarily protected a few pages that I'm currently working on. But feel free to poke around and even submit your ideas. Because once it's officially launched, you will have the ability to edit articles too. All I ask is just don't go nuts and vandalize the thing. That stuff can easily be reverted.

Check it out at ltradio.wikia.com.