ExtraBITS Transitions to TidBITS Publishing System

Those of you who read our breaking news items in ExtraBITS may have noticed some changes this week. As part of the major overhaul to our back-end, something we’re calling the TidBITS Publishing System, we can now make articles in our database available on our home page (and in searches) before they appear in a TidBITS issue. In the recent past, we did this by posting articles to a separate blog that wasn’t connected to our searchable article database. But until we published the issue containing those articles, they wouldn’t show up in searches, and after we published them, they appeared twice on our home page (once in the issue, once in ExtraBITS). It was functional, but inelegant.

We’re also working on a major redesign to our Web site, but until that’s complete, headlines to articles that haven’t yet been mailed out in a TidBITS issue will still appear on our home page in the ExtraBITS space. I’ve also redirected the ExtraBITS RSS feed to our main RSS feed, which now shows articles as they appear throughout the week, rather than only after being mailed out. If you’re checking the main ExtraBITS Web page regularly or receiving its articles via email, this will be its last post, and I’ll eventually redirect it back to the TidBITS home page.