Views from Medina Road

Substantive posts to the website have been light over the past couple weeks not only because of the holidays, but because what time I've had to work the site has been devoted to developing new functionality -- principally, to expand news coverage on the site so that the Locus Home Office staff can post breaking news, via a Blogger blog whose rss feed is automatically displayed on the Locus Online homepage, and whose labels will categorize such posts for easy access. Frankly, this is partly to remove me as the potential single-point-failure in updating the website; and partly, a reaction to competition elsewhere on the web. Locus is still the central focal point for news about the SF and fantasy publishing field, and we need to retain that position on the web.

I experimented with blogger feeds about three years ago and wasn't satisfied with what I found. Moving to Movable Type or something similar was too much of an investment, and Blogger was not quite up to speed. Since then Blogger has improved, notably in its capability to archive posts via dynamic 'labels' that generate label-specific archive pages.

We hope to have the new News feed up sometime this next week, and if it works out I anticipate hosting most of the other website content on a series of parallel blogs -- for reviews, interviews, monitor listings, and so on -- with boxed rss feeds on the homepage. This will save me the manual labor of maintaining annual archive pages, and turn the homepage into a constellation of content boxes, rather like the alternative redesign of the homepage I suggested 6 or 8 months ago...