Hi all,
An eventful month. Let me go over some of the things I've been doing:
1. Membership policy change
Obviously, this was the biggie; a policy six months in the making, and
one that we hope will pave the way for us to offer lots of new great
stuff. There's already been lots of discussion about it; let me focus
on the technical stuff and say that it's my understanding that as of
this writing, there are no technical problems with the policy
transition. If you see any problems, please feel free to let me know.
2. Made /text/ quite a bit faster
I added a little caching code; http://rhizome.org/text/ should run
quite a bit faster than it used to. I'm looking at site speed more
closely than before, so this won't be the last of these sorts of
gradual tweaks.
One thing I realized is that our front page is about 100k, which seems
like it's too big. But then I look at other sites: Eyebeam's reBlog is
512k, Boing Boing is 756k, We Make Money Not Art is 298k, so maybe I've
got nothing to worry about. Hard to say. Some of our site users have
day jobs as web designers and surf our site from their office's T1
line; some are trying to get by using a computer at a media lab in
Bangkok with a 56k modem. You don't want to discount the importance of
users with slow bandwidth, but you'd like to keep the page visually
interesting, too … Opinions, as always, are welcome.
3. Commissions
People are intermittently asking me about this, so: No, we still have
not announced the awards for this year's cycle. We're hammering out
some last-minute details and are hoping to announce quite soon. We're
quite sorry to put people to this sort of inconvenience.
Best,
Francis Hwang
Director of Technology
Rhizome.org
phone: 212-219-1288x202
AIM: francisrhizome
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Director of Technology's report, May 2005
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Type: discussion