The just-completed redesign of our main page signals the ongoing renovation of The Nearby Café. Since the summer of 1997, the Café has, as promised, undergone substantial changes. Among the most notable:

We've opened three new sections:

Keeping our word, we've lived up to the editorial policy we declared a year back: We now promise nothing, in regard to content, that we can't deliver. Everything you see listed on our menu is either already there or else in production.

We've thoroughly overhauled 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.
Not only have we expanded our offerings, but substantial new content -- both imagistic and textual -- has been added to all sections. Virtually every separate component of the Café's menu is enriched at least quarterly, and in many cases more frequently than that. This does 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.

We've also made 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 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 summer and fall of 1998:

So please keep coming back, and be sure to let us know what you think of this next phase.