As of 3:30 AM today, November 14, 2022, I have LOCKED all but the most recent twenty (20) stories. This resulted in about 5,000 stories being locked, which cover slightly more than a year of operations of this website. The locked stories are now accessible ONLY by Subscribers. For next year, 2023, stories available to the general public will only be open for a day or two, then will be locked.
If you're already a subscriber, this will not affect you at all. All the stories will still be there, and will be accessible via the SEARCH feature, which is only available to Subscribers anyway.
Those who are NOT subscribers will find they are fed only the title and maybe the first sentence of a story, then there won't be anything else once the story is locked.
The constant drag of stragglers, who come late to the site to look at very old stories, is being brought to an end. This will improve server performance for everyone, and reduce my costs going forward.
During the course of this week, all audio archives older than a year, will also be removed from the system. If folks haven't heard them by now, they never will. The costs to store them on Amazon's S3 are getting exorbitant.
Search Engine access to this site is also being turned off. The constant "crawling" of the site by Google, Bing, Yahoo and so many others, is going to stop.
Besides, search engines are not a big source of traffic to this site and there are many drawbacks to allowing them access.
If people come to the site from some referral, great. If not, nothing lost by terminating the search engines.
COMMENTS
I have begun looking at new comment modules for beneath the stories. The one I've been using is not being upgraded by its developer and has many drawbacks.
IMAGES and VIDEOS
Very shortly, I will begin the cumbersome process of purging old images and videos. The costs to store them is becoming ridiculous. I __have__to reduce costs. I suspect I will delete everything over a year old.
Listen-By-Phone
I never understood why anyone in this day and age needed to "Listen-By-Phone." When radio station KYAH came aboard with my show, they brought with them that feature. Now that they have gone under, the feature is gone.
I am looking into this but it is not a high priority for me. I am told only about two thousand people ever listened each night by phone, so it is not a big audience at all.
Moreover, the show can be heard via cellphone, tablet, laptop, desktop, and shortwave radio. Folks who don't have any of these, are not likely to be able to support the show financially, so bearing the burden of listen-by-phone costs for them does not seem practical from a financial standpoint. There's only so much that can be done for the poor - or for the cheap.
Additional Radio Stations
I have reached out to other radio stations, but most have full schedules and my Prime Time show would be tough for them to fit in. I will continue such inquiries.
