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Welcome to the SW19's ARMY archive.
This is a site for the material written between 1999 and 2009 for SW19's ARMY.
You will be able to find the following in their original format - including the odd one that is exclusive to here as well.
- Front Pages
- News
- Match reports
- Articles
You will also be able to find exclusively on this site the following classics:
- Guestbook entries
- Forum
- End of Season Polls
For further information and explanations, see below.
REPD
This site was launched on 12th June 2009, one day after SW19's tenth birthday, to (finally) collate together the decades-worth of material written by SW19. This was done because SW19 had switched to Wordpress, which was going to make life and updating a lot easier, but without losing the old material that people grew to love.
What is on this site is an online museum of the bulk of SW19's output (about 96% worth) between those first footsteps way back in 1999, to the last day of May 2009 with a Conference South trophy and renewed confidence in the seasons ahead. With the history of a club called Wimbledon between 1999 and 2009 being the most unique in any club in this country, this site aims to preserve most of what was written in some turbulent times. Extremely turbulent ones at that.
Many "classic" sites do suffer from lack of history, in other words lack of material from dim and distant pasts, when www.sw19s-army.co.uk was come.to/sw19 - now owned by SW19.com - and Yahoo could be found at Stanford University. With the amount written over the years, and the relative cheapness of hosting, it would be criminal not to keep the old stuff for prosperity.
Of course, that was the original plan. And we all know what happens to original plans...
You may notice that the archive is now duplicated between this site and the "main site". Very quickly, it was realised that the "new" Wordpress format for SW19 was too tempting not to put the old news, match reports, front pages and archives under the same roof, so to speak. So on one dull close-season weekday, the back catalogue of SW19's scribings was put onto what should be its final resting place.
Needless to say, it was a long, laborious task - 10 hour days over a week, basically - and even now there will be some fine tunings and some "quirks" outstanding. But it now means that people can search match reports from Blackburn in 2002 easily. Which is something that while not impossible to do on this site, would be pretty difficult for the editor and the reader.
Some things can't be put on the "main" SW19 site. The End of Season polls for example, ditto the Guestbook and Forums, which were designed in a certain way and would inevitably crash the site or just read crap. Not to mention the horrific amount of work that would entail.
The Front Pages are also exclusively on this section, for now anyway. They may be put back into the "main" site, although for now it works better the way they're presented on here. Also, the editor is having real difficulty trying to determine the dates of when front pages were created at the moment - especially the early ones. Many of the front pages have had their (likely) original date of creation changed, which needless to say would make putting them up on WP accurately difficult...
The Front Pages got added to the "main" SW19 site in about July 2009 when after searching through my archives, I managed to (somehow) record most of the dates that I created the front pages. Again, this wasn't the easiest of tasks, but whether through judgement or sheer luck, they were reproduced and properly dated with 99% accuracy.
How did I do that? Well, ironically, having spent so many attempts (subsequently abandoned) to archive the SW19 material, I did manage to keep every revision I did which dated the particular front page. One day, I will put up the various attempts I made at improving SW19 - some of them are right horrors...
Apart from that, It's unlikely that anything else will be added to this site in future - any old reports/archives still "missing" will go straight into the main SW19 site, and as far as I know there are no hidden guestbook/end of season polls hiding in cyberspace. What you see is really what you get. If something does turn up which can't be added to the "main" site, it will of course be added here and links will be made.
Needless to say, the layout, format etc on here isn't perfect. Your editor was (and still is) no website designer anyway, and the whole site was designed and written with some pretty basic software. People have it easy now with blogging software with tags and RSS feeds. SW19 was doing all that sort of thing long before anyone had ever heard of Google Analytics, let alone Google. That said, this site has been created using some crude PHPing, which is something that your editor wished he had known about a decade ago.
Still, the intention for this site is to keep to the "spirit"of SW19 and that's why there's precious little formatting involved. Besides, it takes up too much work as it is...
Some thanks is in order - Coops for hosting the site (and dealing with the odd unexpected problem). A shout-out too goes to the people of the SW19 mailing list who have checked it out to see if it works, and any errors noted and rectified.
For everyone else, enjoy. Any questions or comments, please ask.
REPD
Last updated : 5 September 2009