Hello, Michael—
American Libraries is rolling out a newly redesigned website, tentatively scheduled to appear January 4. The site, which is live now but still carrying the “beta” label, is at www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org. We encourage you to take a look and update your bookmarks and any links to us in your blogs and websites. The AL Online RSS feed will relocate to www.americanlibrariesmagazine.org/news/rss.xml. Making the switch to a new domain could be tricky—we could risk losing readers who are used to our old domain (of course, redirects will be in place, but it’s still going to be a bit confusing), so we wanted to get the word out early.
A bit about the site: It was built entirely in-house in Drupal by Associate Editor Sean Fitzpatrick and offers some pretty clear benefits to end users over what the old site could do. For example, we’re really excited to be able to start offering HTML versions of pretty much all the content from our print magazine (so you’ll no longer need to go through the ebrary platform). Also, all the articles are comment-enabled, something readers have been asking us to do for some time.
Switching to Drupal is also a clear win for us on the back end. Back-end usability has been a dream so far. We look forward to spending more time writing and pushing out content—and less time fussing with CMS issues.
We hope you enjoy the new platform. You’ll see some more official announcements later in AL Direct and in the pages of American Libraries, but we wanted to give you a head’s-up now because switching over your links to our new domain will help make the transition smoother. We welcome your feedback.
George M. Eberhart – Editor, AL Direct
Sean Fitzpatrick – Associate Editor, American Libraries