Views from Medina Road

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Formatting and Infrastructure

I've been home the past two days with a head cold, sneezing and congested, but not unable to sit at the computer for several hours each day. Catching up on listings, Directory page updates, and so on.

Among numerous other updates to the site, I've tweaked the layout and archive settings of the Roundtable blog, taking some of the Torque Control comments into consideration, with the concurrence of blog-overseer Liza -- full posts now appear on the main page, which is archived weekly rather than monthly and which displays a fixed number of posts, rather than all posts within a fixed number of days... But we hesitate about unmoderated comments. Ahem.

There is so much going on with the website it is getting a bit difficult to juggle it all. The news blog, the roundtable blog, my own posts, some of which are excerpts from the magazine (when they remember to send me the content) and others of which are special to the website, like Gary Westfahl's essays and reviews... How to present it all so that none of it is diminished or overlooked? (And Blinks, and ads, and a tiny corner for a link to this blog.) Still working on it. (Avoid clutter!) Along those same lines, I've placed boxes about the Locus Index and Locus Awards Index in the right pane, below some of the past issue boxes, to keep those items in view to casual readers... whom I suspect rarely explore the drop-down menus.

Working on a new policy about handling the numerous (unsolicited) ARCs and galleys that I receive... more on that next time.

8 comments 9:17 PM

Comments:

OK, I have to ask: what sort of vile trash has been showing up in the Roundtable comment queue that you're so hesitant to get rid of moderation? Has even a single (non-spam) comment been rejected?

# posted by

Abigail Nussbaum : 1:15 AM

I don't know actually -- the comments go to Liza for moderation. But I do moderate comments to other posts, like Cory's columns, and see the occasional "This guy's a moron" comment, but the fact that comments are moderated at all probably dissuades some. And for a while there were spam attacks. As for Roundtable, I'd give it a go, but it's Liza's call...

# posted by

Mark Kelly : 6:57 AM

"There is so much going on with the website ..." Who puts reviews up now? My feed-reader has a stub of a review of Watchmen, but the link only goes to the reviews index, which doesn't mention it.

# posted by

Legible Susan : 3:17 AM

I put the reviews up. I didn't realize the rss feed shows only the archive link -- I don't look at my own rss feed. Perhaps I should adjust the layout for the feed's sake? Anyway, the review was quite visible front and center on the homepage. Perhaps clicking through to the homepage is too old-fashioned?

# posted by

Mark Kelly : 8:55 PM

Oh ... yeah, that works. Don't the reviews appear on the archive page until there's another one? Cory Doctorow's column is in my reader this morning and it is linked from the archive page. I must have seen other entries that worked like that, so that'll be why I was confused.

# posted by

Legible Susan : 4:55 AM

PS I should have said "Thanks for replying"!
Word verification untsmort - they always seem to be pronounceable; I wonder how it arranges that?

# posted by

Legible Susan : 4:58 AM

Different sections of the site work differently... we set up Cory's columns via Blogger, to encourage (almost) automatic posting of comments. The movie reviews are posted and archived manually, which gives greater control over layout, etc, but means if I'm in a hurry, I don't always update the archive page as soon as a new item is posted.

# posted by

Mark Kelly : 7:26 AM

Thanks. I'll remember that next time. *note to self: check the front page*

# posted by

Legible Susan : 8:22 AM