May 2010 Site Updates

Some minor changes to the site...a little better every day...

I’m a firm believer in incremental improvement. Today, schof.org got a little better.

I’ve added an Atom feed, so now you should be able to follow schof.org in the newsreader of your choice. I prefer Google Reader, but at the moment, autodiscover doesn’t seem to be working for schof.org there. I’m not sure why yet. However, if you give Google Reader the address of the schof.org feed, http://schof.org/atom.xml, Google Reader will accept it and work just fine.

I’ve also added a form to the bottom of every page, letting you sign up to get an email when I post something good to schof.org. As the little asterisk’d text at the bottom of the page says, “I promise not to be a dick about it.”

I’m using MailChimp.com to manage the mailing list. They offer free mailing list services for up to 500 subscribers and 3000 messages a month, and I think it will be quite a while before I cross that limit. So far I’m very pleased with their service — they’ve made it very simple to get started.

I’ve also added a little experiment to the site, in the form of an Emend link. If you see a grammar or spelling error (or any other kind of error) on the site, you can use that link to report it. I’m not convinced many people will actually use it, but it’s a free service, and if I get even one correction to schof.org, putting the link in the footer will have been worth it.

In terms of content updates, I’m very happy with how the photo essay for the May Day protest march turned out. As always, I see lots of ways I could be a better photographer and essayist, but since I’m doing this site to become a better photographer and essayist, that’s fine.

I’ve got the photos from the Carnival Noir up on Flickr, but haven’t yet created a photo essay here on schof.org. It’s coming; by this weekend if I can’t get it done sooner. One of the organizers of Carnival Noir, Charly, published the photos on her Facebook page, and I’ve been enjoying reading people’s reactions to the shots. (And loving the fact that Charly picked one of my shots as her profile pic.) I can’t wait to see the work the other photographers from that event publish; as far I know, none of their stuff is up yet.