I’ve got 12 — count ’em, 12 — posts queued to go up today on Gristmill, and that’s assuming neither I nor any other contributor writes another word.
Out of those 12, at least five are essay-length and around nine or ten are substantive and interesting, not just toss-offs.
Furthermore, they’re all good. There’s not a bum one in the bunch. (Of course, about half of them are written by me, so I’m flattering myself here.)
This raises a problem: who can read that much stuff, much less pause to think it over or comment on it? Each post is worthy of discussion, but overall Gristmill has become like a fire hose: a huge stream of information and commentary, more than any person could possibly drink. I noticed just the other day that we’ve officially crossed the line where I can no longer keep up with everything in the Recent Comments box over on the right. I owe a great debt to those who contribute to this blog, and I hate for them to spend time constructing a great essay only to see it rocket down the page, get buried, and disappear.
Obviously, this is a good problem to have, to be overburdened with good material. But I want to do something about it, to insure that every post gets its due and that the more serious, discussion-provoking posts have time to linger a while. Grist/Gristmill will be undergoing a wholesale redesign soon, which will debut toward the end of the year and address this problem head on.
But until then, I’m open to ideas. Should I try to cut back on material? Make the recent comments box bigger? Pull some posts out to highlight? Concentrate posts during one time of day? Pull stuff out of the archives and cycle it back through?
Share your thoughts or suggestions in comments.
