Was the first question posted to the NLH Q&A service in November 2004. Nearly 6,500 questions later, this question closed the service:
“Is there any difference in upper GI side effects with risedronate compared to alendronate?”
A sad day…
Was the first question posted to the NLH Q&A service in November 2004. Nearly 6,500 questions later, this question closed the service:
“Is there any difference in upper GI side effects with risedronate compared to alendronate?”
A sad day…
This is the final week for the NLH Q&A service. I’ve been overwhelmed by the response from GPs and apparently there has been a lot of chatter on GP mail-lists moaning about the decision to close the service. So much so it came to the attention of a health journalist and I had a chat with them earlier this week. You can read the story here. I don’t think my opinions were fully represented, but then that’s the nature of journalism. Interestingly, the same GP chatter stimulated a call from BMJ-land.
I have mixed feelings about the end of the NLH Q&A Service.
On one hand I’m sad for:
On the other hand I’m getting so excited by the new Q&A development (TRIPanswers) which will launch in the summer. I’ve had the website to play with for a few weeks now and have been testing it fairly extensively. I’ve just sent another batch of feedback to our web-developers, so I’m hoping the work will be as good as completed by the first week of July. However, the launch won’t happen then as I need to populate the site with data – which is a long, hard, manual task.
I’ve also been making new relationships with various Q&A providers around the globe and that will all help support TRIPanswers. I genuinely think TRIPanswers will be bigger than the TRIP Database…
Well, the extra RAM is now in the system and there is no obvious improvement in speed. It’s invariably quicker at certain times of the day (peak times when memory was an issue).
The analysis of speed and the identification of bottlenecks is booked in to start mid-July. This will highlight code inefficiencies that can either be fixed as they go along or will need further work. Fingers crossed it’ll be the former.
I’ve noticed (and no doubt lots of others have as well) the pretty awful speed of TRIP in the last week or so. Just to say SORRY and that we are addressing the issues:
I use TRIP everyday so am acutely aware of the need for speed – we’ll get there….
Alexa is a leading resource for looking at the popularity of a website. Given the demise of the NLH Q&A I thought I would compare the NLH Q&A service with the NLH itself (click on image for larger size):
They say a picture is worth a thousand words!
There are some caveats associated with those figures (isn’t that always the way). But it’s certainly worth pondering.
I’m aware that this blog has been slow over the last week or so, the reason is simply I’ve been too busy with ‘all things TRIP’ to contemplate what to write about. Specifically, I’ve been heavily involved in 4 significant chunks of work:
I imagine I’ll start more regular posting soon(ish)
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