Website History

Here's a potted history of the URY website, courtesy of the Wayback Machine.

c.1999-Oct 2003

The earliest version of the website available on the Web Archive was definitely a product of its time, with the bright orange branding of that era prominent throughout and a very 90s GIF-based sidebar on the left.

It even had a guestbook, with some rather interesting contents.

At one point in 2000, Gavin Atkinson updated the site.

This design was created by Marcus Pendleton, and doesn't really work too well in 1080p.

Webcasting

At the start of Web Archive captures of the URY website, URY were still broadcasting only on 999kHz and did not yet simulcast on the Internet; however, by 2003, URY had leapt forward into the Internet Age by hosting a worldwide live stream... using RealPlayer. Oh well...

Oct 2003-Summer? 2006

A radically new website design was launched in time for Autumn term 2003, featuring for the first time what seemed to be sensible web design (for it was a new millennium and the days of gaudy sidebars and orange on grey were far behind the URY computing team, in all their wisdom).

The guestbook and RealPlayer streams were still there, though.

This website does work quite well in 1080p, considering.

2006-2010

A minor update of the previous website, with even more orange... and no guestbook in sight! RealPlayer by now had been joined by MP3 and Ogg Vorbis streams as URY's streaming technology marched on.

What the hell is that font on the advertising banner?

This design was jiggled around a bit over its four years of service, but remained mostly the same.

2010-2011

In what was probably the most short-lived (and expensive!) of website designs, URY got a professional graphics designer in to completely redesign the website in conjunction with URY's comprehensive rebranding.

The result was a lovely set of graphics (lovely being subjective on whether or not you like Impact as a font), but the code for the website wasn't as lovely. According to legend, the site was programmed in under a week to meet harsh deadlines and was therefore effectively hacked together. Despite all this, it worked for a year and as of writing the code is still there in heavily modified form.

Sources indicate that a DaveX was responsible for the coding.

2011-2012

The current website was largely the result of a rehashing of the design from last year by the combined efforts of Darren Webb and Rob Stonehouse on design and Matt Windsor on programming (which mainly involved tidying up the previous round of code and implementing the design changes in HTML5 and CSS).

This website won a YUM award in 2011.

There's still no guestbook.

2012-2013

In October 2012, the website was completely replaced with a shinier, newer, completely re-written site based on Django (a Python web framework). Despite the shiny new design, we immediately regretted this decision. The site was put live before it was ready - features were missing and never were fully implemented on this generation, and large amounts of it relied on a completely new database schema, so all of the Members' Internal website tools broke with the replacement. It suffered in service for less than a year before it was retired on August 2013.

2013-Present

For a picture, load up ury.org.uk!

Sticking with the Python, Matt Windsor again went on an endeavour for a better website. With an entirely new codebase in Pyramid (another Python web framework) and SQLAlchemy, and a few shinifications to the actual design itself, this site went into production in August 2013, at the same time as our upgrade to Apache 2.4 and the replacement of Members' Internal with MyURY. Over the remainder of the Summer Holidays, MyURY was expanded to ensure it had capabilities to actually maintain this website, and so shiny Banner and Podcast systems were available and the site once again looked pretty.

There's still no guest book, but there is a sign up form on the Get Involved page.