Tag Archives: blog business

Technical Difficulties

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As you may have noticed we’re really very slow here. Sean and Joy’s article has been linked by boingboing, the HBO twitter account, Jezebel….everybody basically. It has trashed our server.

We’ve redirected people to the google cache version of the article, but the site is still only semi-functional. We’ll see if we can resume regular service tomorrow.

Congratulations to Sean and Joy. This is the latter’s first publicly published piece I believe, and it has become a meme. I’m thrilled to have published it, even if it did crash my little blog.

 

New Hood

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So as you’ve probably noticed things look different. For this, we thank (and thank and thank) Derik Badman, who has not only worked his butt off to make this happen, but who has also had to deal with my incessant obsessive carping, a fate that no self-respecting web designer should be forced to endure. So thorough was said carping that Derik has in fact disavowed all design input, and insists he was only responsible for tech. I will abide by the letter of his wishes in this regard…but I still feel strongly that if anything looks good, you should give him credit, and if anything doesn’t, you should blame me.

Also, I want to extend groveling appreciation to the incomparable Edie Fake, who designed our new banner just as he designed our old one. If you pine for the old one, I thought I’d put it here, where the nostalgic can still visit it as they wish.

And since this is HU, we will now move to the cranky criticism portion of the post.

Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!

Or as my dear friend Bert Stabler put it:

Ugh. Crowded, confusing, clashing colors. Maybe I would like it if I liked reading magazines, which I distinctly do not. But on web pages, less is emphatically more. The TCJ design (which I think carried over from pre-TCJ) was perfect.

I’m sure Bert won’t be the only one displeased. I’m quite happy with our new format, but obviously some people are going to pine for the simpler, more streamlined days of yore.

So…why’d we do it?

Well, basically we were outgrowing our old digs. HU has been moving fitfully towards a magazine format with more contributors and more content. As a result, long ambitious articles get knocked off the top of the page by shorter (albeit still brilliant!) chatty, bloggy pieces. That doesn’t seem fair to either readers or writers. The new design will help us feature the bigger pieces for longer…and should give us room to grow and put out more content if it should come to that.

A ton of people were kind enough to look at the new design in various stages and offer advice and guidance. The site looks and works much better thanks to their input. Many, many thanks to Melinda Beasi, Ng Suat Tong, Kinukitty, Bert Stabler, Derik Badman, Sean Michael Robinson, Kate Dacey, Bill Randall, Robert Stanely Martin, Caroline Small, Craig Fischer, Erica Friedman, Jared Gardner, and Tucker Stone. (And if I’ve forgotten you, please email me to tell me I’m an ingrate/remind me to thank you publicly.)

Despite the help of so many folks, I’m sure there are bound to be bugs and bumps as we get used to the place. Let us know what they are and we’ll try to fix them and/or ignore them, as the case may be. In the meantime, I hope you get a chance to look around. We’ve got a bunch of exciting posts coming this week — and we’re also pleased to welcome a new temporary blogger, Anja Flower, who’ll be writing regularly with us for at least a couple months. Also, scroll down to the right and you’ll see we’re going to be featuring some posts from the archives. This week, we’ve got Caro’s post on Anke Feuchtenberger.

Also, we’re now enthusiastically social mediaing. You can follow us on twitter, or on facebook. Or you can get our RSS feed.

We haven’t managed to do quite everything I’d hoped. Enabling editing of comments turned out to be harder than I thought; I still need to put together a blog roll, damn it…and I really want, sometime, to move our old blogspot material over here….

But for now this is what we’ve got…and not so bad, I hope. Thanks again to Derik, to everyone who helped with the design, and of course to all of our regular writers, commenters, and readers. If you have a compliment or complaint you can email me at noahberlatsky at gmail. Or leave a comment!

Join Me In Hell

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I planned to stab myself in the eye with a blunt pencil tonight, but instead I spent the time creating a facebook page. This was less fun, but at least didn’t waste a pencil.

Justify my pain. Toss your flirty, singing icons into the fiery pit and then say you like it.

Bless Robert Stanley Martin for saving me, incidentally. Without him I would be twice the gibbering wreck I am.

HU To Focus Exclusively on Green Lantern Slash Fiction, Effective Immediately

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As you know, we’re planning a redesign here sometime in the not-too-distant future. I’ve got some ideas about what I’d like to do, but if you have suggestions please let me know in comments.

Speak now or suffer the consequences.

Update: Also, we’re on Twitter now — http://twitter.com/hoodedu. Vom Marlowe is handling our twitternessing, or whatever the kids call it, so sign up and tell her hi!

TCJ.com/fail — Post Mortem

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Yesterday I announced that the Hooded Utilitarian had left tcj.com. I somehow failed to mention in that post how utterly, ridiculously indebted I am to Derik Badman, who did all the technical work to move the site out of the sheer goodness of his heart. I don’t know what I would have done without him. (Or without Stephanie Folse and Caroline Small, who both did some troubleshooting as well.)

Before we move on into our post tcj existence, I wanted to talk a little more about our time there, for good and ill.

Continue reading →

Goodbye Dirk

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As most of you probably know already, online editor Dirk Deppey has been let go by Fantagraphics.

Dirk promises some final thoughts tomorrow, and his twitter feed indicates the parting was extremely amicable. Personally, I think Dirk’s weblog, Journalista, is one of the few things tcj.com has managed to get right, both before last year’s redesign and after. Dirk’s been one of the most intelligent and idiosyncratic voices in the blogosphere. His weblog has been the anchor for tcj.com; the one consistent editorial presence on a site where management rarely puts in an appearance. I fear that without him the site will lose any semblance of a rudder.

But time will tell for that, I suppose. More importantly, this seems as good a time as any to acknowledge my debt to Mr. Deppey. Six years ago I was starting to try to get work as a freelancer, and sent an unsolicited article to TCJ. It sat there for months…until Dirk took over the editorship at the magazine and contacted me. I’d already placed the essay elsewhere, but he let me pitch a couple other ideas. Then he went to bat for the piece I produced when other folks at the magazine found it uncomfortably incendiary.

When I started this blog over at blogger, Dirk was far and away the most consistent supporter of the site. Tom Spurgeon, bless his heart, helped as well, but Dirk basically posted links to everything I wrote. This blog, and the audience and friends I’ve found through it, wouldn’t exist without him.

Some folks would probably count that as a mark against Dirk. Maybe so — but I know that I was not the only blogger who Dirk found and propped up. There are many other writers in the blogosphere who have had similar experiences. Dirk was tireless in locating new writers, and generous in sharing his audience with them. I’m eternally grateful to him for that.

Most of his readers probably think of Dirk primarily as an industry analyst. I always enjoyed his work in that regard, but I have to say I felt that in some way the analysis and the link-blogging were a waste of his talents. Because of his commitment to Journalista, Dirk rarely wrote long-form criticism — which is a shame, because he is probably one of the two or three best writers on comics around. His incredible, endless, delirious essay about Chobits, Love Hina, and biological determinism was perhaps the high point of his epochal shojo issue of TCJ. His 10,000 word essay on boy’s love and being a bottom is probably the best thing tcj.com published all year, and just a fantastic piece in any context. I selfishly hope that with Journalista done he might find time to write more critical and/or personal pieces in that vein.

So I’ll look forward to Dirk’s final Journalista tomorrow, and hope he keeps writing, either for tcj or somewhere else, either on comics or on other topics. Thank you, Dirk. Hope to see you soon.

Update: Dirk’s farewell column is now up. Characteristically, he put it at the end, so scroll down past the day’s links.