Slate redesigned its website this weekend. Unlike the dramatic redesign in 2006 or the reconstructive surgery performed on The Atlantic (magazine and website) this past month, the 14-year-old news commentary “magazine” went under for nothing more than a facelift: the logo remains the same while the site has been merely streamlined: gone is the two-column format and better still, so are the categories at left that would pop out on mouseover, obscuring the headlines I was trying to read. (Instead they pop out of the nav bar at top.) The effect is (mostly) a good one:
If you’ve already forgotten the old version, compare with this, although it doesn’t show the two columns that may have saved space but ultimately produced a confused chronology.
More promising, Slate has turned its blogs-in-name-only (BINOs?) into real deal blogs, complete with permalinks. For years, the site’s handful of blogs were published using the same software as its news articles. In fact, it wasn’t really clear which were columns and which were blogs; until recently, only Kausfiles read as you would expect of a blog. Here is his page now:
This redesign is actually a throwback to the old Kausfiles.com, which Kaus published on his own in the late 1990s until agreeing to be acquired (and paid) by Slate. And it is Kaus who probably benefits the most; because Slate’s software couldn’t automatically create permalinks, if he wanted to make it easy for someone to link, he would have to build an anchor tag by hand. And making writers learn to code detracts from what they’re best at: writing.
There are still some kinks to be worked out. If you click on “Kausfiles” from the front page sidebar, it brings you not to the blog itself but to a list of recent headlines, some of which are oddly duplicative. Better then is to just type kausfiles.com into your address bar, which brings you to http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/kausfiles/default.aspx, which is the screen capped above. That’s still at least one /blogs too many, but at least the permalinks are now search engine-friendly (including words from the title as opposed to randomly assigned numbers).
And if you think you can prune that back to http://www.slate.com/blogs/ and find a list of Slate’s blogs, well, no… and you may see a little farther up Slate’s skirt than either of you had bargained for:
Thank you for being so welcoming! What’s that… join, you say? Well, why not? Here I am:
And in fact, I now have an account with Slate that allows me to… well, I’m not quite sure. Almost certainly nothing, I am fairly sure. But if Blog P.I. moves to Slate, you’ll be the first to know.
The Most Comment-Spammed Blog in America
All irritation at being notified of new comment spam is equal, but the amusements to be found in some spams are more equal than others:
The last time I wrote about comment spam was in April, when I received maybe five to ten such submissions per week. In the final months of 2008 that number is up to something like five to ten per day. There’s no good reason why this should be — as you may have noticed, the second half of the year has been observably less bloggy than the first, and notwithstanding a few spiky links from big traffic-drivers, the daily visitor count has been at best unpromising. So why the surge?
My guess is that unsophisticated pliers of the trade have become a little more sophisticated, and so must be trying — and failing — more often and in greater numbers. I don’t think these are the Russo-Turkic schemers akin to Jonathan Franzen’s Gitanas Misevicius. Much of that, I believe, now defaults to spam filters.
Instead, these comments make it all the way to the moderation queue and seem to come from native English-speakers who have a website to promote, know a little bit about how search engines work, and aim to elevate the PageRank of their meager obsessions (or unwitting clients) in the sections of a blog they found on Google or Technorati. My blog, in fact.
And sometimes they come back. Earlier today, an algorithmic process denied a now-deleted comment access to my latest post, about the Phillips Foundation’s Journalism Fellowship Program. It went something like:
Not exactly a constructive comment, but snarky enough to wave through… except for the business e-mail account and URL of said business pasted into the address field. And the business? A Welsh company selling organic meat (a tautology, if you ask me) on the open Interwebs.
I hadn’t even noticed it until I received an angry e-mail from the bon mot’s possessive owner, someone whom I’d wager fits the above description. In the interests of unusually equal amusement, here’s the e-mail exchange in full:
In retrospect, I believe he was genuinely confused by the phrase “SEO strategy” — after all, if he wasn’t, he probably wouldn’t have left a comment in the first place.
P.S. And to my erstwhile correspondent: If you leave a comment this time, what the heck: I’ll give you one free non-piscatory fish out of the Akismet spam filter.
Update: In case you’re wondering, “I love reading Blog P.I. because…” is the default opening line if you start from the Contact page. And speaking of defaults, I wish WordPress wouldn’t promise that the “blog admin … will be able to restore it immediately.” I’ll decide when I’m able to restore it.
N.B. The title is a reference to DeLillo’s Most Photographed Barn in America. Beyond the explicit nod to “The Corrections”, I count at least three more literary references that I swear were not premeditated.