[Just over a year ago, Vaughn finalized and we launched this new public scholarly website, Black & White & Read All Over. There’s a lot about the site and what it has brought out of and added to our work that I believe is worth highlighting, so this week I’ll do just that in a series of reflections. Leading up to a weekend post of requests for y’all!]
On two interconnected, equally positive changes when the blog shifted to this site (while I hope you’ll continue to dive back into the 15 years of posts at the old site as well!).
Eagle-eyed readers of AmericanStudier might have observed that since the blog shifted to the new site, I haven’t shared the Monthly Recaps that always concluded a month of posts at the old site. The reason is a simple but crucial one: the structure of the blog’s page on the new site is such that it’s very easy to scroll down and get a sense of each weekly series, along with all of the individual posts that were part of those series. Maybe that will feel unwieldy if it gets to be a long enough list, but I don’t think that’s necessarily the case; and no matter what, the most recent series (ie, what would have been included in a monthly recap) will be very easily found and scrolled through. Given that the entire point of the blog is for folks to read the posts, I can’t emphasize enough how much I love this shift.
Well, that’s one main point of the blog—but another and equally important one is the opportunity to share others’ work and voices, especially through Guest Posts. I had the chance to share more than 100 such Guest Posts on the old site and love each and every one of them; but when they were no longer recently published and so weren’t located toward the top of the chronological list of posts, folks would have to click on that hyperlinked tag in order to find and read them. So I’m even more excited that with the structure of the blog page on the new site, the Guest Post category can remain at the top, meaning that the most recent six such posts will always be immediately and prominently visible and thus easily checked out.
Which means there’s just one more thing to say in today’s post, and it’s a specific version of the overarching throughline of the whole week: reach out with ideas or interest for Guest Posts, y’all!
Next reflections tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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