Comments on: Ezine thoughts

By: Harry

Harry — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 00:52:08 +0000

Assuming you’re planning to use your own installation of Wordpress, rather than one hosted at wordpress.com, it would be easy enough to edit the category archive so that it displayed whole posts. You just need to find the bit where it says

< ?php the_excerpt() ?>

and replace it with

< ?php the_content() ?>

I think.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 00:42:24 +0000

Thanks much. I share your ambivalence about comments, and also personally share your preference for fixed widths. I’ll pass your thoughts on to my co-editor, who is the design guru.

Incidentally, we may well stick with Typepad, simply because of the way it preserves the full posts on category pages, rather than giving digests as Wordpress does. Since we are using categories in place of issues, this seems important to me.

By: Harry

Harry — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 16:10:08 +0000

Looks good. Very clean. I have a bit of a pet hate for fluid-width text columns, but that’s just me. I wonder if the post titles could be more distinct? Maybe just by putting a bit more white space at the end of each post? But that’s being very picky. I like it as it is.

There’s a part of me that thinks poems should ideally be presented with each individually on a plain page, which is one reason why I’m slightly ambivalent towards the idea of a blogzine. In practice I didn’t find it particularly distracting, though, so perhaps I’m just inventing problems which don’t exist.

I was interested to see that you’ve got comments enabled. I’m a great believer that one of the strengths of the internet is its ability to create a sense of community, and that requires some kind of interactivity; but when I was thinking about it, I was unsure whether allowing commenting on poems was a good idea. Firstly because of the plain page thing, but also because of the risk of flaming. You don’t seem to be having that problem at the moment :)

By: Dave

Dave — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 01:16:35 +0000

Harry, I'd be very interested in your thoughts about qarrtsiluni, which I helped found last fall (as it happened, "cairn" was one of the alternate names we came up with). It started more as a group blog, but has evolved into something resembling a journal, at least in its editorial standards. We'll be moving to a new URL and a Wordpress platform sometime in the next month, so we'll be looking to make some adjustments in style and presentation. If you have the time to write down any reactions to it, no matter how critical, I'd love to see them.

By: Sherry Chandler » What makes a good e-zine?

Sherry Chandler » What makes a good e-zine? — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 17:36:23 +0000

[...] Heraclitean Fire has a thoughtful post today about the nature of e-zines: Don’t try to be a print journal. The real print journals do that already, and you’re never going to look like anything other than a low budget knock-off. That means questioning your assumptions about how a poetry magazine should work. For example: why have periodic ‘issues’? Speaking for myself, my tolerance of reading lots of stuff onscreen at once is lower than reading it in print, so if a large issue of your ezine appears, I’m probably going to read a couple of poems then move on to something else. That happens with print as well, but at least if I have a physical copy of the journal lying around my house I’m more likely to pick it up again and read some more. On the web, it’s that much less likely. [...]