The technical case for an version of the Oyez site

Hello, my name is Chris Karr and I've been overseeing the technical aspects of the redesign of the Oyez site. Jerry Goldman will describe some of the non-technical reasons for the new site, so I figured that I would focus on the technical reasons.

First of all, since my introduction to the project in 2003, the need of Oyez users and the technological landscape in which Oyez resides has changed drastically over the past three years. In that time, RSS and podcast feed technology went mainstream, Internet users started to prefer downloadable versus streamed audio as devices like the iPod caught on in popularity, and users wanted more media choices aside from straight audio.

The current version of the site at www.oyez.org was originally designed to serve as a catalog for streaming audio files. As new things came along, we attempted to include new types of content in the site, with varying degrees of success. Our introduction of MP3 downloads was very successful, while our attempts to better open up our Image collection was less so. We took a stab at making the site work with podcasting clients, and failed for the most part.

The primary reasons for these problems was that the current architecture was not designed with these types of things in mind. When something new came along, we attempted to tack it on without disturbing the rest of the site too much. As the last three years elapsed, the site began to resemble "spaghetti code". New feature additions became problematic, and maintenance of existing features became more burdensome also.

So, our solution to this problem was to chuck the old site out the window, and begin building a new one from the ground up using more modern software development tools and designs. While much of the content has migrated from the old site, the new site is running on brand new code and a brand new architecture.

This approach has been very successful so far. The old site was created in more than six months. The new one has been put together in less than three. Our new architecture has been very accommodating to the new features we have written, including pervasive podcast feeds throughout the site, more media types (images, video, text), more information about the court (including who sat on what court when), and a simpler (but more robust) search. We've done away with the problematic RealPlayer and replaced it with a simpler and easy-to-use Flash-based player that works much like the ones on sites like YouTube. I could go on about the changes, but I'll let you explore those yourself.

However, since this site is brand-new code, there will inevitably be bugs. We're opening this beta so that we can harness your help in locating these bugs and solicit your feedback about how the site can be most useful for you. If you run into problems, or have a suggestion, please don't hesitate to let us know.

(And just so you know, we're not planning on being one of those new sites that is in a state of perpetual beta. Once we get the bugs hammered out and your suggestions implemented, we will be going out of beta and nuking the old site. So, if there's a feature or piece of media that you used on the old site, let us know what that was so we can prioritize it and make sure that it's there before we pull the plug on the old box.)