Why Must Trillium Die?

By David McKelvey

It was recently pointed out to me that while we’ve posted and talked about the actual process of archiving and removing legacy content and the final step of ending Trillium, I’ve never talked about why.

Websites for large institutions become cluttered almost immediately, and maintaining a clean, efficient system helps keep it fast, reliable and secure. Specific to Trillium and legacy, we need to remove old content and improve overall security.

Old Content

We kept Trillium and it’s websites around for a good while after the redesign, since we wanted everyone to have a good resource of past material. A number of Trillium users had hidden content going back several years if not nearly a decade. When we launched the new site, we wanted everyone to have that wealth of old content available to them to make the transition as easy as possible.

We hid most of this old content from Google and other search engines, but over time, Google followed links to and fro and eventually collected a bit too much of it for our liking. (There was and is still valid content on legacy, but some of the out-dated content was trumping more authoritative content on the new site.) Needless to say, removing old or replaced content on legacy is absolutely important to the success of our new site.

Old Software

Trillium is well past it’s expiration date and New Media stopped active maintenance of it prior to my arrival almost four years ago now. It runs on server software that is older than that. Trillium needs to be closed so that the legacy server can be retired. (Trillium is not the only service running there, but it is a huge part of it.)