Some Comments on the Work in Progress

We've turned the corner into 2010, The Year We Make Contact, and as The Friday Challenge stumbles down the road towards its first anniversary—or fifth, if you count the four years it spent in larval and pupae form over on the old Ranting Room site—we're making some improvements. Some of these are under the hood and evident only to those who write for the site, while others are the sorts of look-and-feel minutiae we hope will make the site less cluttered and more comfortable to read. On the gripping hand, meanwhile, we have some things in the offing that are significant changes in the way we propose to operate.

In general, we're trying to move towards more of a magazine-like look and production schedule. Blog posts tend to age and decay with a half-life comparable to that of some of the more temperamental synthetic radioactives; we want to change that, by keeping selected content in the foreground longer. Towards this end we'll be offloading a lot of the static content to the Rampant Loon server: I'm paying for the bandwidth anyway, so why not? One of the more significant and obvious changes is that as of February we're inaugurating a "fiction showcase" feature; we'll have more to say about that shortly. (We are also in negotiations to force me to reduce my use of colons, semicolons, and long and convoluted compound sentences, but these negotiations are in a delicate stage at the moment and no definitive results are presently forthcoming.)

The biggest single change is hinted at in the evolving top-bar menu, which many of you have noticed I've been tinkering with off and on lately. (Otogu has not been kind, these past two weeks.) I started out trying to emulate the look and feel of your basic news-type site, which is why there are certain elements present now but slated to disappear when the design is finalized, although others may remain longer than originally planned because they appeal to my sense of the surreal. Particularly, note the currently inactive links to "The Greater Challenge" and "The Lesser Challenge."

The simple truth of the matter is that over the course of the past year, as The Friday Challenge has evolved and significant writing talents have emerged, participation and readership have dropped off. We have developed a strong core group here, but it's a small group, and becoming smaller every month. Henry put his finger on it, both on- and off-blog: when we began, the Friday Challenge was a fun, lightweight exercise, that didn't require a significant time commitment. I'm really pleased by the quality of some of the writing talents I have watched emerge here—and amazed that some of you haven't sold novels yet—but this pleasure has come at the cost of losing the participation of the just-starters and the easily discouraged, and these are not people I want to lose.

Hence, the Big Change: beginning in February, we will have one major challenge issued on the first Friday of every month, which will require a fully developed response, but you will have a month in which to write it and a week for comments and judging. The rest of the time, we'll have weekly minor challenges, which we plan to keep short, light, and much easier. We also have some changes to the judging process in the offing which we hope will increase lurker participation, but I'm out of time to explain that now.

Your thoughts, comments, or observations?