When we began mendax.org in 1996, we had reasonably concrete aims for the site, but as with all things, situations change and end-goals shift accordingly. Where mendax.org was launched as the public face of a multi-person operation, we’ve been in a very different place for years, with content now produced almost exclusively by one author. This is especially true with today’s ease at placing online a personal vanity blog, making the undertaking of an e-zine, as in mendax.org’s original vision, a somewhat moot point; many earlier contributors have gone their own ways to launch their own sites, and as a part-time endeavor without the resources to launch in the “pro” blogging space, mendax.org has become a reflection of the thoughts and interests of its one-man post-writing machine team.
Yet still, we’ve had clear goals for mendax.org’s evolution, which we hoped to roll out in stages throughout 2009. Steering these ideas in the right direction, time considered, has still been a heavy task, however. This lack of time, compounded with the realization that we have other ventures we’d like to put a stake into, has made us realize that letting mendax.org continue on its enormously slow path to becoming what we intend it to become, however creative that product may be, is almost a moot endeavor. Why half-ass a project for years when we can reduce our goals considerably for a passing product now?
In other words, we’ve pretty much decided that we’re not going to keep pushing mendax.org on the direction we hoped to take it, and are instead leaving it where it is. That’s because looking at the state of the site, we see a decent personal blog and little else. Why mess with that, if we’d rather expend our energies on new projects, while leaving mendax.org in a relatively happy state?
To this end, readers will see some subtle changes at mendax.org to reflect its un-new direction. For most, the upcoming changes will barely be noticed, especially in regards to content and frequency of posts. In a nutshell, mendax.org’s purpose, if such a thing is notable, has merely been redefined on the author’s end. And that purpose, as we move forward, will be to continue with the same level of content from the clearly-stated perspective of the one-man writing team that’s kept mendax.org afloat for some time now. And what’s why as time goes on, even with “mendax.org” remaining as a legacy foundation, the site will probably, one day, be referred to only as the website of WyldKard.
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The new site is much cleaner looking than the old site, which is nice. I especially like the little spinning globe of topics. Double nice. I really wish, however, since you’re retooling a bit, that you’d make it easier to leave comments. I don’t like having to constantly click on an article to get to a place where I can leave a comment. It’s an unnecessary step, especially on the feature article. I can understand it if you’re reading an abstract of the article, since you have to click to read the rest of it anyway.
Does this mean that you’re going to stop using the pronoun “we” when referring to yourself, because that would be jawesome.
Thanks for the feedback. Regarding the commenting, you’re saying that you’d like a “leave comment” form at the bottom of the top post on the front page? The way it’s handled now is the same way commenting is handled on most blogs – you have to click the “comment” link to get to the post’s individual page.
The benefit with this method is that a reader can review existing comments before leaving their own, whereas cropping existing comments from the front page, but still leaving a commenting form, defeats this.
And no, we’re sticking with the old pronoun for now. It’s stylistic.
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