Old & New

On this page an account is given of the reasons for changing the Ghana Place Names site from the original to the new format.

It may be of interest only to those with technical inclinations.

The Old Site

Ghana Place Names first went online on 2 October 2010 as what is now called a Google 'classic site'. In 2016 Google introduced their 'new site' option with the ability to convert from classic sites. GPN was not converted at that time because of the limited facilities and styling available in new sites, but in August 2020 Google announced that all classic sites would be deactivated from September 2021, so a new platform became essential to avoid closure.

The Conversion

Apart from the question of appearance, the main difficulty involved in converting GPN to a new site was page limitation. GPN had in excess of 2300 toponym records at the time so the Google conversion tool could not be used. Moreover, even if the new site were built manually, the page limitation made it impossible for GPN to be hosted on a single Google new site. Other hosts were considered, but no satisfactory alternative was found elsewhere. The solution adopted was to create a new Google site for each administrative region in Ghana, of which there were at the time 16. Each 'satellite' site contains all the toponym records for its region, and the satellite sites are accessible from links in this main 'hub' site, which also hosts the special focus pages.

The New Site

All the regional satellite sites are built 'manually', i.e. each page is made using the site tools, but the content of each toponym record is generated from the GPN offline database in HTML code automatically, which is then pasted into a new site page using the 'Embed' tool. This is the same procedure that was used to generate the toponym records in the old site, except that in classic sites an embed tool was not necessary since the HTML code was directly accessible from the edit menu. After 12 regional sites had been built it became technically possible to use the Google conversion option to transfer remaining toponym records to new sites, because the redundant old records could be deleted, bringing the page total in the old site below 1000. However this was not a practical option because the formatting is lost in the conversion process, and it takes more work to reformat a migrated page than to produce a new one by pasting the HTML code. The linked examples show the difference between a converted page and a new page. Nevertheless, the conversion process has been used to create this, the hub site, because (a) the original URL can be retained for a converted site, which is important for maintaining inbound links, and (b) the migrated toponym records remain linked to the region site homepage place lists until the creation of the new records, thus providing continuity.