About
Fudje first appeared online in April 2009 after years of gestation as a concept for a local website dedicated to the island of Jersey.
...the name
Deciding on 'Fudje' as the name of the website spurred me into action as the question of what to call it had long eluded me.
I chose early on to utilise the Channel Island TLD's of .je and .gg for the domains and I wanted to incorporate these letters into the names of the projects in some way. My initial thoughts were to use contrasting colours in the letters of the island's name, e.g. .Jersey, to highlight the TLD and for a while I toyed with calling the website 'explore.jersey'. However, I was not content with this name and it wasn't until it occurred to me to use the .je and .gg TLDs phonetically that I had the inspiration to call the projects 'Fudje' and 'Fudgg' for the Jersey and Guernsey sites respectively.
I have since found that the word 'fudge' can be defined as "late news type matter inserted into a box in a newspaper allowing late news to be included without the whole page having to be remade" [1], which is quite apt for a website that provides regularly updated local news :)
...the website
Fudje has been developed in Jersey by hypertexture.net as a non-commercial personal project. The website utilises the Drupal CMS and is updated every 30 minutes with the latest local news, sport and weather collated from the RSS feeds of Jersey's media organisations.
...the archives
The early archives were limited to only 16 weeks of data which was unsuitable for our storage requirements and so in November 2009 I changed the system so that news could be archived indefinitely. There were some initial problems in retrieving the data feeds that resulted in some missing news and sport items, but the archives have been stable since May 2010. Modifications in January 2011 ensured that the archives were correct when public archive access was granted the following month.
Sources
- "fudge." Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition. HarperCollins Publishers. 01 Feb. 2011. Dictionary.com http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/fudge.