[thelist] Announcing WebDevNews.com

[Chris Spruck]

Tremendous thanks to those who have provided kind words and suggestions. Obviously, this is a work in progress (what site isn't?), so we'll be considering several changes and improvements. We're not out of the first 24 hours yet. :)

To those who thought this announcement was inappropriate, you must have missed my tip in the original post. Or other people's site announcements. Or numerous site check requests. In the 4+ years I've been on this list, I have never promoted personal sites in a sig in any way, so consider this my first time (as a site check request, perhaps) and it might not be the last. 

At 06:01 AM 11/19/2004 -0800, Scott Dexter wrote:

>And I haven't noticed any glaring grammatical mistakes. Could the
>person who griped about the grammar please identify example(s)?

Quite frankly, there aren't any, so you guys can stop looking. :) Amazing for a guy (Samir) whose *third* language is English, eh?

>My only nit is the lack of set-off between body text and links.
>Consumer Reports does it too, and it's an impedance to be hunting
>around with the mouse looking for links. Other than that, it's clean,
>quick, and quick-hitting. Nice job for only three pizzas :)

Scott - I think you mean that the link colors are the same as the text? Within posts, we aren't underlining anything that isn't a link, so at least that cue is currently in place. Let me know if you meant something else. We're working on a possible scheme to match up link colors with our category colors within posts. If you think that sounds flaky, do you have any other suggestions on visual cues? Personally, I'd hate to see standard blue links everywhere, so I guess we'll see what works well.

Another thing some have commented on is the spacing and filling of category sections. Once we get 5-6 items in a category, a link to "More Headlines", "More Interviews", and so on, will appear at the bottom of each section. The site is based on WordPress, so for those familiar with WP, I think you'll recognize the taxonomy of topics, posts, etc.

>But on a business perspective, what's different here than, say,
>slashdot, or evolt.org even? A semi-rhetorical question to Chris and
>Samir --Why would I go here instead of somewhere else?

Focus and frequency. You won't find us reporting on Quake 6.5 and Lord of the Rings Part 27 a la Slashdot, but we hope to provide something newsworthy and useful that's very specific to web developers, as often as we can.

Peter - Glad you enjoyed discovering "colophons". O'Reilly books are known for their colophons, which always have a few paragraphs about the animal on the cover, plus the usual fonts/apps/credits info. I think most, if not all, of their books listed on their site have the colophon available from the links on the left side of each listing. Example: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/bioskills/colophon.html

By the way, Atom 0.3 and RSS 2.0 feeds are now available in the footer or sidebar.

Thanks again for everyone's input and interest. Constructive comments and suggestions are always welcome.

Chris