First off- Welcome to all new readers of this site!
Secondly- Thanks to all old and continuing readers. Things have changed a fair bit round here, with a new design and a new emphasis on an old direction, with still a change or two yet to come, and I thank you for sticking with me.
Today’s Programming Note concerns what you can expect on this site in the future. The main announcement is that Out of Ruins (outofruins.org) will now be featuring short stories (and possibly poems) from authors besides myself (MJG). I’ve long wanted to set up my own weird fiction e-zine, and now I have. Boom. I’ll still be posting my own stories up here, but will be careful to delineate which are mine and which are from that week’s featured author. I’ve already had several submissions, and am in the process of accepting a few. They’re weird, and dark, and that’s awesome.
So, future programming, the schedule looks like this:
Mondays– New fiction from featured author.
Tuesdays– New ruins re-post featuring creative commons text and photos sourced from around the net, on cool ruins locations.
Wednesdays– Short fiction from MJG, if I have any.
Thursdays– New original ruins photos and text, from MJG.
I hope in the future to feature dark weird art on this site, as well as interviews with authors/photographers/explorers, and reviews.
All the best,
MJG.
Comments 8
Sounds interesting. Good luck with the new format and e-zine. I just hope Fridays give you enough time to earn your living. 😉
One of the biggest attractions of this site has been your response to readers’ comments. It gives additional insight into who you are and where this wierd stuff comes from. Just as feedback in the form of comments encourages a blogger, a blogger’s response to comments encourages readers to continue following and participating on the site. I hope you’ll continue to make the time to keep up with comments.
Author
Hi David- I certainly appreciate the encouragement, comments are definitely a highlight for me and I’ve every intention of replying to all that I get (though sometimes I may be a bit slow). As for Fridays, well, if I can get some kind of art feature going, I won’t even have that day to work on. Hmm…
I’ll send rice. 😉
Re. the new black background
In general, I like light-on-dark color schemes, and Out of Ruins looks good dark.
A couple of formatting problems for IE 6: On the main page the right-hand sidebar is overlapping with text and pictures in the main section. In the sidebar “Recent Comments” section, the commenter’s name is in a color invisible against the black background.
This next problem began before you set the dark background and continues: The “buttons” in the top navigation bar are all stacked on top of each other. “haikyo” is the only one visible on top.
I’ll let you know whether these are also problems on Firefox and Opera on my home computers.
Author
David- Thanks for this info, argh, I’d thought the ie problems with the header were fixed. I’ll look into it now, along with other stuff. Glad you like the dark look- seems more fitting for a site about ruins to be more mysterious. Also black helps photos look better, or so I hear.
Of course, IE 6 on my work computer isn’t exactly the hottest new browser. The problem may not be worth troubling yourself with if other versions and browsers are rending it OK.
Hey buddy, good luck with the new direction. Dark theme looks good too.
I’ll be reading – J
The new layout looks fine in Firefox 3.0.13 and Opera 9.63.