OJ has had a facelift, becoming OJM by risa
Ah so, we’ve been threatening the Open editors for a while with talk of an upcoming Open overhaul, and then we went quiet for a while, and now we’ve sprung it on you. (boo!) This is not an official redesign, just a primping. We’ve added some quickness with the old asynchronous javascript (and by we, i mean Elran) and if you check out post pages, and category archives you’ll see two other really neat things he’s got going on. They both have to do with the archive’s ability to be smart, to think about what we’ve produced here at open over the years, and to pull out historical content in interesting ways. And both are plugins from the Wordpress community that El’s worked to integrate into the site. He also upgraded us to Wordpress 2.0, so the backend experience is much smoother. yay wordpress and open source code yah!
The other big thing that happened with this OJ facelift is that we’ve moved over to our own domain name. We’re out from under the loving umbrella of touchbasic, and we’re ready to stand up on our own. When picking names we struggled to find something that would keep the bits we loved- OpenJournal -but that would have a chance in the seach rankings, which the words “open” and “journal” on their own do not. Not the height of uniqueness, that, but I can’t help but love the whole idea of Open and I wanted to keep it. This space has been a kind of prolongued performance, in a way, of an idea about open sources that that needed fleshing out. I needed to get into the world of web publishing, and using open source software, and writing about it from inside the medium, in order to flesh out the questions and tacit troubles and things. I’m like that, I need to wear an idea for a while to see how it feels, and how I feels about it. I also wear new clothes for days on end when I first fall in love with them. (Don’t tell MAryanne, but I loved the crazy orange sample dress she gave me last week so much that I even slept in it and then wore it out again the next day, grosss, i know.) When ideas are as big and complex and beautiful and endlessly fascinating as this layered thing Weber calls “the open source process” then my excited exploration can last a long time. To the point that it ceases to be a kind of performative thing, and it just becomes part of my mental tool kit, or even something closer, like a skin.
Anyway, OpenJournal began as a grand idea that we did not have the technology or time for, and it’s been through several identity crises, but all the while we’ve been here in Montreal, and the people who write for us abroad are all connected to us by the time we spent here together. And so somehow, as a base quantity, the dreamy meta-place of all our imaginary Montreals defines us. It’s in that spirt that the MOntreal has been added to the domain name. We do not make any claims to sum up or speak for the city, we just live here. And in a way, when you’re here on our site, it’s like you’re living here for a bit too. You are literally subject to our laws, and you’re letting us print our ramblings on your eyes, so you’re getting steeped in our culture slowly but surely (watchout:).
One last word on the new domain name and then i’ll stop making such a huff: we went with the .com. There were opinions voiced about the corporateness of that, and how much nicer .org sounds, and in an emotional way I agree, but.. and i hope this but doesn’t sound too conniving, but… it’s just harder for a non-.com to get ranked. There’s a bias there, i guess, in the search engines. Or maybe it’s just a side-effect of the fact that people remember .com as a default. When it’s something else they don’t remember which one (org? net? ca? what?). And I do want this site to be easy to find and use, but also, i think if dot com is the default, then the onus is just on us to redefine what the dot com means, to get in there and own it and play with it and test it’s edges, and even push on what that abbreviation could be, because who says it has to begin and end with Company?. what about community, or communist, or comingling, or combed, or come on, or complete me? anyway, that’s the thinking.
cheers!
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