Do Not Adjust Your Terminal

You'll notice there've been some changes to the Beatrice home page since Pearl Abraham dropped in Thursday to make a guest post--and, in fact, she's part of the reason I made those changes. What with my reportorial duties at Galleycat, I'll be relying on guest essayists and bloggers a lot more than I have in the past, and when Pearl and Emily first came on the scene last month, I got a few notes mentioning temporary confusion on readers' part until they got to the end of the post and saw the "posted by" line. So, as you can see, I moved that byline up to the top of the items, just below the title, and I eliminated the timestamp because it was extraneous. Now you'll always know right away who's writing for the site.

Meanwhile, the sidebar to the right had gotten so long and unwieldly that it was regularly spilling over the main text, and making the bottom of the home page look clunky. So I stripped out the links to other blogs and moved them all over to a links page that needed updating anyway.

More importantly, I've slapped The Stewardess Is Flying the Plane! up top, where you can't miss it. And instead of linking to Powell's or even Amazon, I've created a special home page that was inspired by a new e-book from Seth Godin about the transition from "blogs" to "lenses." A blog lets you discover its author's voice over time; a lens (ideally) gives you instant insight into the author's take on his or her chosen subject. Or, as Godin writes, it "provides meaning and the links necessary to take action on that meaning." So that's what I've tried to do: boil down my book into a single web page that will also give you as much access as I can muster to other online resources dealing with '70s Hollywood. It's an interesting experiment, and I recommend that other writers at the very least give Godin's pamphlet a quick read to see if it gives them any ideas for their own home pages.

And I did it all in Movable Type, too! Once I figured out I could strip out all the datelines and timestamps and stuff, the building blocks became a lot easier...