Summer and Autumn
Horrible day here. In the upper 80s. The air quality doesn’t look too bad – the sky at the horizon is not brown – but it smells terrible outside all the same. It always does once it gets this hot. Heated-up car exhaust, I assume. I don’t like summer much.
But never mind that. The Dictionary gets printed next week. Once that happens, you see, it will be a book. Rectangular thing, open on three sides, pages with printed words on them. Something one can hold in the hand. Something one can read more or less anywhere – on the bus, in the park, in the checkout line at the supermarket, on the treadmill. That’s much harder to do with a stack of pages open on all four sides, a stack that can blow all over the room if a breeze comes in the window. No doubt that’s why some clever inventor thought of binding – fastens the thing down, you see, and makes it easy to turn the pages without making a mess. Wonderful invention, books.
I know, you’re thinking I’m very naive and fatuous, going on and on about one little old book. All very well for you, of course, you write books every day, but it’s all new to me. Well plus there’s the fact that I am naive and fatuous, of course; that has something to do with it.
So it will be printed and then before long it will be published, and then you will be able to read it. I’ll sign your copy for you if you like. I might zoom over to London when it comes out, just so that I can jump up and down and squeal and generally act like a fool. I might as well, after all, because it’s not as if I’m not one. The weather will be cooler by then, too.
Hello, have you considered adding an rss feed to this page?
“Well everyone including me considers it a blog already.”
Right. Well if that’s true, I’m about ready to commit suicide. I’m certainly not going to do anything to promote that view.
“Would it also be possible to merge a copy of “latest news” and “articles” with “notes and comments” so that there’s one common rss feed and one page to bookmark?”
No. I think that’d be a daft idea.
Nooooooo everyone doesn’t consider it a blog. I hope. I suppose some people do but then I correct them sharpish. But some people categorize Arts and Letters Daily as a blog, when it’s nothing like a blog.
No, News and Articles are the real meat. N&C is just me blathering. Amateur hour. A back shop.
“Amateur hour. A back shop.”
It’s not that there’s anything wrong with N&C (obviously!), it’s just that we do want to distinguish between what might be fairly off the cuff stuff which we write here and the stuff which ends up in the Articles and In Focus sections, for example.
:- )
I know! That’s all I meant. This is indeed fairly off the cuff – hence the name. It is indeed notes and comment, as opposed to the more deliberative stuff in Articles and Bad Moves and In Focus. I think there’s some virtue in off the cuff (hence I like blogs more than you do), in relatively quick, off the top of the head thoughts. But we do indeed want to distinguish.
Well blog actually encompasses a lot. ALdaily is a blog imho although I can see why other people don’t consider it one. N&C is definitely a blog. If you keep saying it’s not a blog we’re going to have one of those Life of Brian moments, where Stan says he wants to be a woman.
As a reader, if I want to see if there’s something new on the site I have to look in four different places. My point is that that’s not very user-friendly. I wasn’t suggesting that you move things to N and C, but that you duplicate them there so I can just check one page for updates. You can just throw in the links between posts as in kottke.org.
Chris
“As a reader, if I want to see if there’s something new on the site I have to look in four different places.”
More than that, actually. But this is no different than say the BBC web site or Guardian Unlimited.
We also have am automated weekly email which details all the new content in the past week.
Well that’s not entirely true! About the four different places. The front page does most of that. Updates in News, Articles, N&C, Bad Moves, Flashback and In Focus all show up on the front page. You have to go to different pages to actually (yes I know that’s a split infinitive, I like them) read them, but not just to see if there are new items. (New comments on N&C don’t show up though, that’s true.)
The front page ‘last updated’ thing for N&C and Bad Moves is an afterthought, added comparatively recently, precisely with thoughts about user-friendliness in mind.
(And actually – just by way of truth in advertising – the weekly email doesn’t detail absolutely all the new content. It doesn’t do Flashback for instance, or any of the sections in Amusements. Does do In the Library though.)
Sure, N&C is a blog! No disagreement there. We even say so on the front page. I thought you meant the whole of B&W.
That’s true that it helps to have most of it on the home page, but the date feature under N and C and Bad Moves doesn’t help me that much because I’m not likely to remember exactly when I last visited. Perhaps you could add a “last entry/item” field there too.
Hmm. I’m sure Jerry S will consider it, because he considers everything, but I doubt that we can. We had a bit of a struggle over how to put any update thing at all in N&C and Bad Moves. It’s a question of space, you see. It’s not good design to put too much on the front page – but on the other hand we have a lot of material and a lot of sections, so inevitably we have a lot on that page. So there’s a permanent trade-off going on, between offering information about what’s there, and not overpowering the page with clutter. Plus we will be adding new features over time, which is another reason not to multiply items now. So…I hate to be unco-operative, but I think we’re about as user-friendly as the realities of time and space allow at the moment.