VG May 2005 Blog Archives

May 31, 2005

Videos coming soon

The multimedia section of the site is still empty, but I've got fairly long video interviews of Rita Dove, Lan Samantha Chang, Lolita Hernandez, and Jessica Hagedorn that need to be made into clips and transcribed. It's coming soon.

This post is also a test of the Markdown plugin.

Posted by DieterBohn at 12:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 20, 2005

What's next for VG

Just a quick post to let folks know what I'm working on to add to VG in the near future. Read on to see what's in the hopper and please comment with your own ideas!

• Content
  • There are a lot of updates to Biographies in the hopper.
  • I have video interviews with several writers in the hopper. One of which has just about the nastiest audio feedback I've ever heard, that will come out pretty muddy but hopefully listenable
  • some other errata
• The site
  • I'm going to make a switch to php dynamic pages sometime this summer. That will mean less rebuilding of pages to make things from different sections show up. Right now a change to one blog (or to the menu system at the top) requires multiple rebuilds of multiple blogs systems. It's a hassle.
  • Alternative stylesheets. I'll be setting up at least one alternative stylesheet for mobile devices and probably another one for the visually impaired. The menu system at the top in particular may be difficult to access for alternative browsers. The whole thing devolves rather nicely without CSS, but in that mode it does lack certain necessary items (like, oh, a TITLE at the top!), and it also places the entire menu at the top of the page. That should be moved to the bottom, eventually
  • More extensive comments. Right now, we've only enabled visitor comments on the actual VG Blog. But it will probably be nice to add them to the other pages.
  • More trackback. Right now, only the individual pages are accepting trackback pings, meaning links to things like the frontpage and category pages aren't followwed. Given that it's more than likely that these pages will be the most often linked, trackback for them is pretty important.
  • W3C validation. It's not there yet, and I feel a little ..dirty.. because of it.

Posted by DieterBohn at 12:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 19, 2005

VG is Live!

The old site now points to the new VG. With the new site, adding content is a lot easier for us, so it will happen a lot more often. We're all pretty excited! Expect postings from the other VG staffers soon!

Posted by DieterBohn at 10:05 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 16, 2005

Almost ready to go live!

Pretty much everything is up, just waiting on a few things and we have some more information to add to the permissions section. It's been a lot of work (a lot more than yours truly expected), but I think the end result is pretty great. I'll be posting about some of the new features, especially the (somewhat innovative, I think) way that the new VG site uses Movable Type's Trackback feature.

--Dieter

Posted by DieterBohn at 12:16 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack