One month on: The Evolution Continues
Saturday, March 13, 2010 at 8:59PM It's been one month since we moved Shared Creation out of its old triple Wordpress blog format and into something brand new. The problem was not Wordpress, as that is one fine CMS. The problem was that the evolution of Shared Creation into 3 blogs was something that ultimately was detracting from the aim of creating a singular magazine that combined news, arts and ideas under one roof.
This perhaps isn't so surprising as the three blog format was something that itself had formed after the first experiments with Shared Creation, and that had started with a Wiki. Shared Creation was originally a loose concept, a determination to use out of the box software (to prove the accessibility of web development) and a need to talk about all things creative in the new electronic media.
I think it proves the point that design can result in a more immediate good ending, and that evolution gets somewhere good in the end.
What you look at today is end result of an evolutionary process that has led to the current design and an editorial point of view that whilst keeping things simple is definitely getting somewhere. But then I didn't start this as a blogger or journalist. Just an interested person trying something out.
That's the history lesson and very rough mission plan over. Lets see where we are.
The move to a new format has brought in all the editorial content from the Wordpress blogs. There are a few formatting issues and over time I hope to clear these up. We had a DNS issue making access to Shared Creation impossible for a few days. I wish to apologise for that to my readers. I'm also now getting used to new content management system. It is easy and direct. I am liking it a lot. More importantly its multi journal format has helped me create where I think Shared Creation should be in a design and editorial point of view.
What's next are two levels of refinement. The first is purely design. There will be small tweaks to current design of Shared Creation. These will simply be there to make it either look better or read easier. The second level of refinement will be in the content. There will still be short and simple news but I feel that time has come to add in more value - and by that I will add in more opinion and more analysis.
This is an important step in Shared Creations continual development if you are an long time reader I thank you for your loyalty. If you're new - well now is a good time to start reading.