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As usual, I didn’t notice that another anniversary of Locus Online has passed; Monday was the 9th anniversary of the site’s going online. I’ll have to plan something visible for next year, perhaps the long-planned expansion of the awards index.

I have a more substantial topic to discuss, but I’m not sure I’ll finish this evening. I’ll post this much for now, and the rest when I finish.

Over 50 Locus Poll ballots received today! It’s possible some of them were paper ballots received by the Locus office in Oakland and then keyed into the online form — they tend to do so every week or two, in batch mode — but even so, it means that over 1000 ballots have been submitted so far, and even when the duplicates (some deliberate, some due to e-mail downloading glitches) and invalid ballots (we keep telling you not to vote for the same item more than once in the same category…) are eliminated, it’s very likely we will exceed last year’s total of 911 valid ballots after all.

Check the site later this evening for some awards news…

Too busy lately (re-engineering and consolidating the various Locus Online databases, in part) without any particularly urgent topics to discuss, to post anything in a while.

But I did want to note, for anyone reading this, that the Locus Poll deadline is just 2 days away. Despite the very fast start with poll responses this year, as of this moment we’re still a bit behind the total responses of last year, though the rate of submissions in the last few days (10+ per day, accelerating toward the end) may make it up. It will be close.

One passing item for now: I’ve always tried to take design cues for the Locus Online homepage from the designs of various prominent professional sites… CNN, New York Times, etc. It’s been interesting to note that in the past couple weeks both of those sites, not to mention my local NBC TV news station site, have increased the width of their sites to something on the order of 980 pixels. (The current Locus Online homepage is 800 pixels wide.) It’s to take advantage of the increasing use of large screen monitors, the NYT editor noted, fairly enough. I observe this with interest, though I have no thoughts about expanding the Locus Online homepage size anytime soon. I’m reasonably happy with the homepage layout at the moment, and since there’s a significant portion of the SF audience who, despite the futuristic, progressive theme of their literary interest, are in fact somewhat conservative in the actual practice of their use of new hardware and software, I’ve actually tried to stay rather a bit behind the breaking edge of website design for Locus Online. (Comments welcome, pro or con, as always.)

Response to this year’s April 1st ‘issue’ was mostly positive, though there was one significant Not Amused e-mail from a well-known, indirectly involved professional. I’m sure he was right, though whether the offense was to be expected as part of the territory of running April 1st type spoofs, or whether it was due to a lapse on my judgement, I’m not certain. Probably the latter…

I also got some flack about the pop-up ad, which on that day appeared as an overlay on the homepage (for something called The Grudge) that disappeared after about 15 seconds. The income from the various service-provided ads isn’t so great that I’m willing to put up with pop-ups myself, but the agency assured me this was a worthy deal. I won’t know any time soon, since ad agencies seem to have a 3-month cycle time for doling out commissions. Anyway, the immediate feedback will make me less likely to agree to such deals in the future.

I’m tempted some year to run no spoof articles at all, but to save up three or four legitimate news items and post them all on April 1st, and let readers figure out if they’re spoofs or not. Would that be too cruel? It would certainly be easier.

The difficulty with the online forms, including the Locus Poll form and the subscription form, has been resolved. (The problem was that the emails to locusmag.com generated by submitting these forms weren’t being received; they were disappearing somewhere.) The problem does seem to relate to some recent e-mail upgrade by Locus Online’s hosting service, CI Host. This is what they said:

We have been upgrading our email programs on our servers and in this case the nobody user which the webserver runs as did not have the correct permissions. Our admin fixed this once we brought it to his attention.

Now why didn’t I think of that.

First, a general comment: with the sale of my dayjob employer from one high-tech firm to another high-tech firm about six months ago, practical issues about updating the website and monitoring e-mails have become much more difficult. The new owner is much more restrictive about all things Internet, as I’ve alluded in previous posts; one consequence is that I’m no longer able to update the site via FTP from my workplace computer (roughly 8-5 Pacific time), and a more recent consequence is I’ve had to cut off auto-forwarding of Locus-related e-mail to my workplace computer completely. (The IT department was noticing how much spam came in from that account.) I’ve taken great care over the years — obviously — not to abuse company policy about e-mail and Internet access during work hours, using those facilities only when urgently needed to meet the responsibilities of maintaining the site, but in recent weeks I’ve been unable to do even that.

The mitigation plan that’s been put into place is that I’ve detailed instructions for the Locus magazine office staff in Oakland on how to update the website when I’m unavailable to do so. This plan went into effect for the first time this past Monday, when I first learned of Stanislaw Lem’s death shortly after arriving at work about 8 a.m. that morning. I found enough time (during breaks, between meetings, etc. — obviously) to consult various references and write a brief death notice about Lem for the website, but since I couldn’t post the updated homepage myself, I emailed the updated index.html page to Locus in Oakland, where Tim Pratt kindly FTP’d the page to the Locus Online server. (Meanwhile, of course, Tim was busy writing a much more comprehensive obituary for Lem for the next issue of Locus Magazine.)

Second, there’s been an apparent disruption in processing of the various webpage forms on the site, including the Locus Poll and Survey form, and the Subscription form. This seems to coincide roughly with a remarkable drop in the amount of SPAM I’ve received each day. I first noticed this Monday, when I got home from work and launched Outlook and saw that it had only about 200 e-mails to download since 7:30 that morning…whereas usually it had been 800-1000 e-mails each weekday during that period. Spam reduction is great; I assumed this was some new service provided by the website hosting service, CI Host. It took a couple more days for me to realize that during that same period no new Locus Poll ballots had been received, and for me to confirm that with the Locus Magazine folks in Oakland (who get cc’d all the Locus Poll ballot submissions). Since I was effectively incommunicado at work today, Tim Pratt for a second time updated the homepage this morning with the ‘Important Announcement’ about these technical difficulties.

I suspect the Spam filtering and the disruption in form e-mail responses are related; but, though I filed a ‘trouble ticket’ with CI Host as soon as I got home this evening, I haven’t yet gotten a response from them about the cause, much less a fix. They are usually fairly decent about responding to problems, so hopefully by morning this will all be resolved. That might still require some folks to resubmit Locus Poll ballots…

Third–a final comment: it’s almost April 1st, and one of my indirect (via Gorilla Nation, the ad service who provides all those random rotating ads in various spots) advertisers has set up a special ad for that day, which requires pop-up windows for full display. I’ve already installed the pop-up ad tags for the homepage this evening, so for the next couple days try clicking through to allow those windows, if you can. I usually resist them, but just this once. I’ll turn them off again on Sunday…

I spent some time today auditing the Sf/F/H Magazines section of the Links Portal, discovering 8 or 10 newer titles that I’d neglected to add over the past year or so — including Postscripts, Subterranean, and Flytrap.

I also broke down and re-ordered the SF Blogs links by author, with just a few that are well-known by name or are group efforts listed at the top by title. I like the playfulness and individuality of many blog names, but it was getting so that even I, who maintains the list, had trouble remembering where in the list so-and-so’s blog was… I couldn’t remember all their titles. I did retain a bit of eccentricity by listing them alphabetically by *first* name.

Suggestions for additions to Links are always welcome — especially bloggers out there who comment provocatively on the field. My web surfing time has been especially constrained lately, and I’m sure there are bloggers out there I haven’t come across myself yet.

As it turned out Bantam Spectra said they were very reluctant to ship copies of the winning book outside of North America; they’ve had problems with deliveries. Three of the 10 announced winners are in Europe. I should have thought of this possibility before I announced the winners, but I didn’t. So I sent Bantam names of three runners-up, including two who got only 9 questions correct, and told the 3 Europeans I’d send them a copy of the book myself, via Amazon. Seems they have no problem getting books from Amazon…

Next time I’ll have to establish more restrictive rules for entrants.

In retrospect, though, I think the difficulty of the test was about right. Most of the questions were easily answered by anyone familiar with Locus Online — the interview index, the awards index, etc. — while the final question required either knowledge of Locus Magazine itself, or an especially canny Googling ability. About 1/3 of all entrants got all 10 questions correct. I just had to remind people to keep submitting…

As for the Hugo nominations… I was surprised not to see Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys on the final list. I was disappointed not to see any of my favorite short stories on the list. I was unsurprised to see Hugo regulars Resnick, Burstein, and Sawyer on the final list; they seem to have their constituencies, regardless of what reviewers and anthologists think (disclosure: I haven’t read their stories here yet). Happy to see Stephan Martiniere, my current fave artist, make the ballot. Interesting to see that Locus has three editors this year. Predictions: Stross for novel, Willis or Link for novella, Doctorow for novelette, Resnick or Lanagan for short story, Scalzi for the Campbell. And am I a teeny bit happy that the Best Interactive Video Game category collapsed..? (Actually, I nominated Myst V.) When there could have been a wildly popular Best Website category, whose contenders, granted, change every year…?

I’m not at ICFA, where all the cool people in the field gather every March; finances and circumstances didn’t permit, this year. Instead, I’m sitting at home posting blinks.

The VanderMeer giveaway contest seems to be stalled; no new submissions in almost 48 hours now, and of the 20 or so received thus far, only 8 have provided a complete set of correct answers. Was the quiz too hard, then? Or do most Locus Online readers already have the book? Anyway, per the initially announced conditions, the contest will remain open for a week, and if there aren’t 10 complete sets of correct answers, then the nearest runners-up will get the remaining copies.

PS– I see now that the post I attempted last night, which seemed to fail 3 times, in fact got posted 3 times. I’ve deleted two of them. Sorry for the redundancy.

Responses to the quiz have quickly dried up — no new submissions at all today. Was the quiz too easy, or too hard? Of the 16 responses received thus far, half of them got at least one question wrong… I won’t say which one. Still short of 10 winning entries. Per the originally posted conditions, the quiz will stay up until March 21st, though I’d thought after the first 12 hours that it could have closed much earlier….