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Welcome to The Weekly Gripe, an electronic publication created by private individuals for anyone who has ever felt the need to have a good old gripe about people, things or just society in general.
The aim of this site is to provide a platform for discussion and to encourage others to express their feelings. It's good to get that gripe out into the open!
My name is Kenny and I've run this site since 2000/01 when I'd finally had enough of delayed or cancelled trains on my daily commute to London and I had little to do except build this. There wasn't really a platform (excuse the pun) for complaining about stuff at the time so I thought I'd create one. Pretty soon friends started moaning about stuff and then The Weekly Gripe really took off!
Over the years the site has gone through a fair few changes. Take a look on the Wayback machine if you're interested. I'm constantly tweaking and adding new things, perhaps not as quick as some would like, but there again I've got a day job too! The Weekly Gripe has made my life interesting in a number of ways. It was a full time job at one time and through it I had the opportunity to visit Google's offices a couple of times and even did one or two radio interviews. But apart from all that it's still a site I run because I think it needs to exist. Facebook and the rest haven't quite got a monopoly on the whole "Gripe" thing yet I think!
I'm very interested in feedback from visitors to the site, this helps me continue to improve it and hopefully make The Weekly Gripe a place worth visiting! Drop me an email if you've got any suggestions or comments. Better still leave them on the Soapbox for everyone to see!
Other Projects
As well as running this site I also work on a number of other sites and apps. Please check out the links below:
Real Ale FinderThe Marinade Database
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I'm intrigued that moving to WordPress could have a negative impact on traffic. Maybe that's something I need to be wary of myself. Although, my site is being created in WP, rather than moving to it (so maybe that sidesteps some potential issues, like broken links etc.)
I read somewhere that WordPress itself may not directly affect SEO as much as certain plugins and themes used within it, that may be penalized by Google. No idea how accurate that is though. It's all a bit of a mystery to me!
It's a bespoke build I'm afraid as was the very first version of the site back in 2001.
The site was quite busy up until several years ago, 5,000+ visitors a day, but then I moved it onto Wordpress and it immediately killed it and we haven't really recovered since. Facebook probably had quite a big impact too, perhaps people go there to have a moan!
We're back on bespoke build again and I've also removed the login requirement as I felt it stifled discussion. It has also gone quite stale due to my work on the Real Ale Finder project and I will be putting more work into the site again including publishing regularly, but it's a bit of a juggling act as you can imagine.
Probably a longer answer than you required, but I would imagine there's a Wordpress plugin that could adapt the comment system to your requirements.
All the best
I'll build that as soon as I've got a break on the current project. Agreed it's definitely needed. We used to use the google custom search for sites, but it really didn't look very good.
"I vaguely remember that this was the case in the past when the site was very popular, before the cumbersome, indeed arguably disastrous, redesign of the site."
I'm sorry, I missed this comment unfortunately and you are absolutely right, the site redesign did kill things in particular when I moved it to the Wordpress platform, the later being the final nail in the coffin. It was rebuilt hopefully to closer to how it was around in 2006. This had a list of the latest gripes listed, but the comments were always on the actual page with the gripe. The very first version of the site however only showed the most recent gripe on the home page with comments directly below - is it this that you are referring to?
Kenny (Site Admin)