Welcome to Firefox News' new site!
| Meta | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Welcome to Firefox News' new site! |
| Creator: | Leva Cygnet |
| Date(s): | January 17, 2007 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom: | multifandom |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | Welcome to Firefox News' new site! |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Welcome to Firefox News' new site! is a 2007 essay by Leva Cygnet.
It introduces Cygnet's new for-profit fan site, Firefox News.
Some Topics Discussed
- born of a previous site: (early link) and (earlier link)
- the site is a bit expensive, which leads to Cygnet's essay later, called Advanced Fandom Economics: It's Okay To Be A Capitalist
- solicitation for fan-written material (commentary, reviews, fiction)
- fans would be paid money
From the Essay
I finally have the new platform up and running. Pretty, no?
The old site was a mix of pages done by hand, using SSI for repeating elements, plus some cobbled together scripts for RSS-to-HTML displays on the front page, and wordpress blogs. This new site is entirely integrated, and has some fancy features both on the front end and the back end. It has captchas! Yay me! I was deleting 1000+ spam messages per week in the Wordpress blogs and the captchas should eliminate that.
(If anyone's curious, we're running Article Live as the platform. It's not cheap, but you get what you pay for. You need a little CSS and PHP knowledge to configure it, but overall, it's one of the easier installs I've ever done.)
First off, this site will have a much stronger focus on actual fannish news. Melissa Wilson and I will be updating the site on a daily basis starting in February with news for fans. There's lots of fannish news sites out there, but most of them are either very specialized, covering just one genre, or they draw their news from Reuters or AP just like everyone else. We're covering metafandom interests in general.
On the other hand, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, or the latest installment of Survivor will NOT be mentioned on this site by my Official Editorial Decree.
We'd rather focus on the people we find actually interesting, and who matter to fandom. You're a lot more likely to find a news here about, say, Hayao Miyazaki, Stephen King, Ron Perlman or Sam Raimi than what Paris Hilton and/or Spears did in the back of a limo this week.
Additionally, the site's pay rates for articles will be going up. I will no longer be buying many reviews but I will be looking for opinionated, funny, informative, and well written articles. See Mary Sue, Who Are You? and Your First Con: A Most UnConventional Experience for examples of the sort of articles I'm looking for. The Submissions category to the left has more information about submitting an article to the site.
Finally, I am looking for a novel for the site which will be serialized and illustrated. Because it will be illustrated, it needs to be a very visual story, and I'm looking for something with two very strong characters and a romantic component. It should be "fantasy" but I'm open to various flavors of fantasy. Again, see the Submissions category to the left for more information.
And without further ado, welcome to the new site, everyone!