DargonZine
Volume 12, Number 8 |
Distributed: 8/14/1999
Circulation: 711 |
 |
DargonZine is the publication vehicle of the
Dargon Project, a collaborative group of aspiring fantasy writers on the
Internet. We welcome new readers and writers interested in joining the
project. Please address all correspondance to
<dargon@shore.net>
or visit us on the World Wide Web at http://www.dargonzine.org/. Back
issues are available from
ftp.shore.net
in members/dargon/. Issues and public discussion are posted to newsgroup
rec.mag.dargon.
DargonZine 12-8, ISSN 1080-9910, (C) Copyright August, 1999
by the Dargon Project. Editor: Ornoth D.A. Liscomb
<ornoth@shore.net>,
Assistant Editor: Jon Evans
<godling@mnsinc.com>.
All rights reserved. All rights are reassigned to the individual
contributors. Stories and artwork appearing herein may not be reproduced
or redistributed without the explicit permission of their creators, except
in the case of freely reproducing entire issues for further distribution.
Reproduction of issues or any portions thereof for profit is forbidden.
|
Editorial
hings have been fairly quiet on the Editorial front this month, so
I'll use this space to observe one of our recent successes that doesn't
get much conscious notice, and then announce another Web site
enhancement.
First, the success. It doesn't sound very impressive, but we are
producing more DargonZine issues more regularly than ever before. This
may not sound important, but five years ago it was one of our readers'
biggest criticisms. From 1991 to 1993, we put out only 13 issues, but
worse yet, the publication schedule was wildly unpredictable. In five of
those instances we went more than five months between issues, and in
another five instances the lag between issues was less than two weeks!
1993 is particularly noteworthy in that we distributed five issues, with
the average time between issues being 12 weeks, plus or minus 13 weeks!
Think about what *that* says about the predictability of our publishing
schedule!
Justifiably, our readers weren't very happy with that situation.
The first thing we did in response was to post a
publication schedule on
our Web site and do our best to meet or exceed the dates listed. Since
then, things have improved dramatically. Now we are putting out nearly
three times as many issues, and the last time we went more than two
months between issues was in 1997, nearly two dozen issues ago. This
year we've continued to reduce our average time between issues (down to
four weeks), while putting out issues more regularly (varying only a
week and a half from the average).
We're very proud to have made such a substantial improvement in
both the amount of prose we produce as well as the predictability of its
delivery schedule, and want to make sure that it doesn't go unnoticed.
And speaking of improvements, I want to mention another improvement
that might seem minor at first glance, but whose significance I hope you
will come to appreciate. In brief, we've converted the DargonZine
Online Glossary to use a MySQL database.
Doesn't appear to mean much, does it? First, if you're not familiar
with the Online Glossary, it's a facility on our Web site which allows
you to look up an encyclopedia-style definition of any person, place, or
thing in the Dargon milieu. It's a very handy reference to have around,
and one of the most popular parts of our Web site.
If you are familiar with the Glossary, this change comes with a few
minor enhancements. The Glossary itself includes more information, the
search function has been improved somewhat, and we cleaned up the layout
of the pages.
But most of the changes are all behind the scenes. The Glossary is
really only one small part of a large database we maintain which
contains information about all our issues, stories, writers, and
Glossary items. Over the past half year we've been working on making all
that data accessible via the DargonZine Web site through a database
system called MySQL.
The transition of the Glossary is a major step toward making all
this information available to our readers. In the near future we'll roll
out additional services which allow you to get at more information, such
as how many stories we've printed each year, which stories are in which
issues, which writers have printed the most prose, what the
chronological order of stories is, and so forth. In addition, the new
database will help us develop new interactive features, like giving you
the ability to rate all our stories, or cast votes in story contests and
see the results immediately.
All these things are planned, and will be made possible through the
implementation of the MySQL database which we are rolling out in a
limited fashion today.
Whether through programming new services or making more information
available to you or just through putting issues out more predictably, we
are doing our best to make reading and participating in DargonZine a
great experience. If you run into any problems with the new Glossary, or
if you have any ideas about how we can improve our Web site or any
aspect of what we do, please don't hesitate to let us know by sending
email to us at <dargon@shore.net>.
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