Website
YSTV has had some form of presence on the World Wide Web from the mid-1990s - first hosted on the university's servers, and then on its own servers.
Society Websites
Sadly lost to digital history, the very earliest websites provided only basic information about YSTV, and were hosted on the University of York's Computing Services servers under the old socs15 and socs16 user accounts - for the general society and grapevine service websites respectively.
The Grapevine service had its own website largely to provide a means by which YSTV could advertise this service to conference organisers and local advertisers.
Alongside the growth of the Internet, successive Webmasters - or indeed anyone who fancied having a go - developed and improved the website (usually coding by hand!) to start building in additional features or more detailed information about YSTV and its activities. By 1999, certain programmes were starting to have their own sub-sites - including Cooking With and Election Night 2000.
Cooking with... sub-site
Election Night 2000 sub-site
ystv.york.ac.uk
By 2000Unverified or incomplete information, arrangements had been made for YSTV to have a sub-domain on the University's york.ac.uk domain - ystv.york.ac.uk - pointing to a server housed in the Technical Room at the back of the Studio. Eventually the website itself was transferred from the University's servers onto this server.
In mid-October 2009, YSTV launched a redesigned website. This used a framework called CSF, developed by Alan Briolat, and the development throughout 2008 and 2009 was primarily led by Nick Howell. Old versions of the site can be accessed using the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.
Along with the 2009 release of the site, this History Wiki was reskinned, and another MediaWiki installation (docswiki) was created to document the station.
In early 2010, the styling of the website was tweaked. This style would continue to be used for the next seven years.
ystv.co.uk
While YSTV has held the domain ystv.co.uk since at least 2004, it was originally set up as a redirect to the york.ac.uk sub-domain. In 2011Unverified or incomplete information, this arrangement was swapped, with ystv.co.uk becoming the primary domain for both the website and contact emails. The york.ac.uk sub-domain continues to redirect to the main address.
Nearly a decade on from it's original introduction, the CSF-based website is still in use today. While it's styling remained pretty much the same for several years, it continued to see development by successive computing teams, with several new features added both to the public side, and the members-only section.
The age of the code (in terms of student turnover), the many hacks/patches made to add new features, and a general dislike of PHP saw further development of the 2009 website stall in the mid 2010s. Several attempts were made by individuals to create a new website, but these projects were either short-lived, or were simply not as feature-rich as the website they were trying to replace.
As a compromise in 2017, Matthew Stratford redesigned the public website to use Bootstrap - a modern website design library. While this gave the website a major visual overhaul, the underlying code is still the same CSF-based website from 2009. For the first time, the website also had responsive design - allowing the layout to change depending on whether it was being viewed on desktop, tablet or mobile.
Grapevine Website 1998
YSTV Website 1998-9
October 2000
January 2004
November 2004
October 2006
October 2009
February 2010
February 2019
