The archive has been rebuilt

Faster pages, Sinhala URLs that search engines can index, a structured directory of notable people, and a gallery.

The Govigama heritage archive has been rebuilt from the ground up. The thirteen pages of history that made up the old site are unchanged — every word, in both languages, is exactly as it was. What has changed is everything around them.

Sinhala pages can now be found

Previously the site chose its language with a browser cookie, which meant the English and Sinhala versions of every page shared a single web address. Search engines could only ever record one of them, so the entire Sinhala translation was invisible to anyone searching in Sinhala. Each language now has its own address: the Sinhala reading of this page lives at /si/news/archive-relaunched/.

A directory instead of a list

The presidents, prime ministers, independence patriots and scholars who were previously a single long list now have individual pages, grouped and filterable.

Faster, and safer

Images have been converted to modern formats, the page cache has been switched on, and a number of files that should never have been reachable from the public internet have been removed.