Views from Medina Road

Too busy lately (re-engineering and consolidating the various Locus Online databases, in part) without any particularly urgent topics to discuss, to post anything in a while.

But I did want to note, for anyone reading this, that the Locus Poll deadline is just 2 days away. Despite the very fast start with poll responses this year, as of this moment we're still a bit behind the total responses of last year, though the rate of submissions in the last few days (10+ per day, accelerating toward the end) may make it up. It will be close.

One passing item for now: I've always tried to take design cues for the Locus Online homepage from the designs of various prominent professional sites... CNN, New York Times, etc. It's been interesting to note that in the past couple weeks both of those sites, not to mention my local NBC TV news station site, have increased the width of their sites to something on the order of 980 pixels. (The current Locus Online homepage is 800 pixels wide.) It's to take advantage of the increasing use of large screen monitors, the NYT editor noted, fairly enough. I observe this with interest, though I have no thoughts about expanding the Locus Online homepage size anytime soon. I'm reasonably happy with the homepage layout at the moment, and since there's a significant portion of the SF audience who, despite the futuristic, progressive theme of their literary interest, are in fact somewhat conservative in the actual practice of their use of new hardware and software, I've actually tried to stay rather a bit behind the breaking edge of website design for Locus Online. (Comments welcome, pro or con, as always.)