In-House
News
For the Café's
archive of these updates, click on a link below:.
September 19, 2001
Beginning the Café's Second Century
As The Nearby Café enters the new millenium,
we proudly announce that our traffic has grown
tremendously. We'll log well over 800,000 hits
for the year that'll end October 1, from a quarter
of a million visitors during that period. We
find that both astonishing and gratifying.
To kick off the Café's
entry into the twenty-first century, we've undertaken
our first redesign since mid-1998, and our first
across-the-boards content enhancement since then
as well. Under the supervision of webmaster John
Alley, the entire site has begun to undergo a
massive overhaul of its design, navigation system,
and technical features, along with a thorough
replenishment and enrichment of its images, texts,
and other offerings. (We've chosen Adobe's GoLive!
Cyberstudio as our site-management program; this
software makes working on site a joy for me, who
grew up on BBEdit and Fetch.)
The first fruits of these
efforts you'll find in the new version of C: The
Speed of Light, my own newsletter here and the
Café's flagship production. In addition
to its first major graphic-design makeover, we've
added PDF files, audio files, mpeg movies, and
other new options there. We'll slip in even more
in the coming months.
We've rethought and redeveloped a long-planned
submenu of which we're particularly proud, dedicated
to Literature & Writing, and featuring three
new sections:
-
The
Sepoy Rebellion Online
-
WordWork™:
Survival Strategies for the Professional Writer
-
Stubborn
Pine: The Writings of Earl Coleman
We've also reconfigured
the former New York Photography Calendar, repurposing
it -- maybe temporarily, maybe for good -- as
a History of Photography Calendar.
Keeping our word, we've
lived up to the editorial policy we declared several
years back: We now promise nothing, in regard
to content, that we can't deliver. Though all
of our various sections are always either undergoing
or awaiting some tweaking, and new content gets
added to them periodically, nothing at this Café
is now or henceforth will be "under construction."
Everything you see listed on our menu is already
here -- if not in its final, polished form, then
at least as a functional prototype with substantial
content that we think merits your attention.
One previous feature of
the site's Photography menu, En Foco Online, has
recently left the nest. En Foco, Inc., a non-profit
organization devoted to the work of minority photographers,
has opted to establish its own autonomous site
under its own domain name, www.enfoco.org.
We're pleased to have been able to serve as En
Foco's launching pad into cyberspace, and wish
them well in this new venture. With that move,
En Foco joins The
Photo Review, another worthy non-profit which
also made its online debut under our auspices
before setting up shop on its own several years
ago.
While refining our offerings,
we're once again thoroughly reconsidering our
site organization, making all sections of it,
we think, much easier to access, and the site
as a whole simpler to navigate. At the same time,
we're working to keep our design clean, and our
various pages quick to download, since we know
that many of our visitors are surfing with less
than cutting-edge equipment and can't handle either
huge files or unnecessary bells and whistles.
However, we're beginning also to experiment with
some of the multimedia options that the 'Net makes
possible. We will try always to find means of
making our content available to visitors regardless
of the sophistication or simplicity of the hardware
and software they're using to access our site.
Not only have we expanded
our menu of offerings, but substantial new content
-- imagistic, textual, and multimedia -- have
been and/or will be added to all sections regularly
from now on. We will enrich most of the separate
component of the Café's menu at least quarterly,
and in many cases more frequently than that. This
enhancement will not happen all at once, or on
any fixed schedule, so we suggest that you check
back frequently to see what's new. As a rule,
most of those additions are listed in our Blackboard
Specials page, accessible from our main page.
That's where you'll find information about the
most recent updates and changes.
We also continue to make
it a practice to archive the bulk of what we post
in all sections, rather than merely replacing
it with new material, since a number of you have
emailed us in search of older content -- and also
because this site is the only extant repository
of its own past and present content. In addition
to archiving most recent and current material,
we will gradually fill in this archive so that
all significant material posted since the Café's
inception in the spring of 1995 eventually will
be available and on the record here.
Here's a preview of what's
upcoming imminently -- meaning over the fall and
winter of 2001:
-
We'll open Love &
Lust, the Café's submenu dedicated
to matters amorous and libidinous, later this
fall.
-
We'll add a number
of new offerings to the Nearby Café
Gallery, including portfolios by Barbara Jaffe
and Barbara Nitke, and a multimedia collaboration
between myself, Nina Sederholm, and Mikko
Hassinen.
-
We'll continue the
design and technical renovation of the site,
on a section-by-section basis.
-
Finally, we're planning
an online store with secure credit-card transaction
capability.
Come back often, and let
us know what you think of this next phase.
-- A. D. Coleman
Executive Director
For In-house
News about the Café's management, staff,
friends and watchcats, click here.
For the Café's
archive of these updates, click on a link below:.
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