Monday, May 26, 2008

I have been casting about

for a way to produce a news page for Otoliths Books. I’d thought about using Blogger, but wasn’t too keen simply because the temporal nature of a blog would mean ending up with bits & pieces about a single book — reviews & such — scattered throughout, rather than concentrated as I would prefer them to be.

An email from John Tranter, the editor of Jacket, has solved my problem. Google now has a new offering called Google sites. John has just started up the Jacket Notes homepageNews, book parties, readings, new books, new magazines, and what’s on: the world of contemporary poetry as seen by Jacket magazine — & was graciously inviting me, along with other editors, publishers, etc., to post news of new releases there. I’ll definitely be taking up John’s invitation.

But viewing & looking around the Jacket site was definitely an Aha moment. So now I’ve created the Otoliths Google Site, have started to populate it, will continue filling in the back catalog. It’s an easy site to navigate & work with, especially if you’ve previously used a corporate website. Lots of formatting available, the ability to include attachments — jpegs, pdfs, docs — but it also has a hierarchal structure beneath the home page & an alphabetical listing of lower pages so that they’re all visible from the top page, & can easily be accessed & edited from there.

No comments: