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    Welcome to our shiny new website!

    Published

    November 21, 2019

    After many months of secret toil and aesthetic deliberation, we are very proud to launch our brand new site — a total refurb from the ground up! We appreciate it is very possible that, unless a seasoned denizen of the PDR pages, you might not immediately notice anything so different. So to help you along here are some key highlights…

    • Perhaps most obvious: a new more spacious layout. In particular we’ve given our essays a much roomier home entirely free from distracting elements down the flanks — a more pleasant and focused reading environment which carries with it the added advantage of allowing for bigger images in the landscape orientation.
    • The Collections posts have been totally replumbed. Images, books, film, and audio are now released from their respective silos and gathered into one central interface area which allows one to summon a variety of mediums together under common categories/themes, such as “18th century” or “Language”.
    • There’s now a grid format in place for the display of images in our Collections posts to save the endless vertical scrolling previously demanded by very image-heavy posts. Upon clicking, an image can be enlarged to view as part of a carousel gallery.
    • We’ve introduced a dedicated Explore page. In many ways one can see this as so many shortcuts through the labyrinth (which over the years has become fairly labyrinthine!) — to help you get quicker to the content that might interest and also to facilitate the aimless and serendipitous ambles.
    • All the “further reading” books at the end of the essays can now be browsed, along with our set of recommended books, in the all new Bibliography section.
    • In various ways, there’s an effort to give a bigger emphasis to the source institutions. You can now more easily search PDR content by source, and (coming very soon!) you’ll be able to view and sort these sources by “levels of openness”.
    • One of the major improvements is in the realm of speed. Gone are the creaking of page loads and flow-stalling lags that some of you may have experienced previously — this new site promises to be lightning fast!
    • And last but not least, the very section where this post lives — the “blog”. This is a brand-new home for missives of a more ephemeral nature: incidental musings, updates about the project, as well as other things in the world of the cultural public domain (new releases of content, new books by our authors, etc.) that we think might be of interest.

      • In addition to the delights visible on the surface, there are myriad improvements to the infrastructure beneath. Just as exciting as what has already been done is the future potential of what this general behind-the-scenes replumbing allows. In many ways what you see now is the completion of just the first (though very substantial) phase. There is lots more exciting stuff to come!

      I’d like to end by saying a huge thank you to our developer Brian Jones, whose generosity with his time and general coding heroics have made all this a reality and who we are very excited to welcome onto the PDR team as Technical Lead. And, of course, to our supporters, particularly to all past and present Friends of the Public Domain Review whose kind donations have made this all possible.

      Lastly, if you’ve any feedback on the new site then please don’t hesitate to get in touch (whether praise, new ideas, flagging of the inevitable broken link or image!) — you can email Adam on adam.green@publicdomainreview.org.

      — Adam Green, Editor.