Don't Look Back in Anger

When you design a new website, not everything makes the cut. Some things you thought were good ideas in the planning stage seem foolish by launch time. Every webpage editor has a panic moment when he realises some part or other of his website is a mistake.

Which makes it so much fun for the rest of us to find these strips of the cutting room floor and try and work out why they were dropped.

How about this for example. It seems that Aneurin Glyndwr had big plans to, wait for it, let us comment on his website! Maybe this is what they meant by "Aneurin Glyndwr is a forum designed as a platform for lively debate.". Of course, even this "Platform" wasn't really a place to discuss and comment - all it was supposed to be was a way for the website to post up some fan mail. So what happened? Did the website not get any fan mail to put up? Answers on a postcard.

But that's not the only thing cut out before the website went live - Aneurin scrapped some posts he had written in February, one with the interesting title of "Opposition's Taste For Speeding". Having looked at the old post there's nothing of value in it - something about a Tory saying that police should be less fixated on speeding. What is interesting however is what Aneurin's Blogroll looked like back then.

While his current blogroll starts with such heavyweights as Alistair Campbell and Comment is Free (oh the irony!) the original version was much shorter. While some (Labourlist) survived the pre-launch cull others weren't as fortunate.

Brother Tecwyn was there originally, even though the blog has shut down. Same goes for Luke Young (last post December) and Nick Bradley (last post September!). More interesting is "Don't trip up". This blog is still live so why was it in the original line up and then dropped? Maybe something to do with this post which asked the following questions:

Why is Labour so out of touch?
Why is Labour so defensive?
Why has Labour become so conservative?

Not quite the party line Aneurin wants to follow then!

One last note on the old bloglist, seems that the infamous Martin Eaglestone managed to grab a spot in the original but was dropped while Leighton will be delighted by the fact that, even though he was omitted from the first draft, Aneurin eventually decided to be one of the few blogs that do link to him!