I don’t usually blog about websites. It’s what I do for a living, and lord knows, it’s enough to do it eight hours a day, without going on about it here. But, there are a couple things that are so dumb, that they just s@*T me. Here they are…

1. Do not use images in place of text. If you do then search engines will not be able to index the information on your page. A good example of this is the Black Clock magazine site. Nice magazine, lousy site. You could google for a month and never find it, so what’s the use?

2. Provide information people expect. If you are an author and you are putting up a web page add a “News” section. In a fit of foolhardiness, actually call it “News”. It will be something easy for interested folk to check and update. If you are feeling absolutely giddy, you could even see if you could syndicate the news page with an RSS feed or some such. Who knows, it could actually work for you.

3. Keep images to a minimum. Images are cool, but the world is not on a broadband connection yet. It’s just dumb to pointlessly pack a page with images. For examples, see here.

Oh, and I doubt anyone from the SFWA ever reads this site, but here’s an idea. Get all of your members to set up RSS feeds for their news, set up a news page on your site, and automatically you get to be one of the major SF news sites in the world. Seems obvious, no?

The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts was held this past weekend in Fort Lauderdale. Although you probably didn’t know it, it sounds like you and I would both have had fun there. Lots of cool interesting people, all talking about SF and stuff. One year I’ll make it.

This year the guest scholar was Australian writer and academic Damien Broderick. Damien is a really interesting guy who writes everything from hard sf to dense critical stuff, and a lot of it is really top notch. During the conference the IAFA people presented Broderick with their Distinguished Scholarship Award. This is very cool. I don’t know which piece of scholarship specifically they were thinking of when they decided to give the award to Damien. It might have been for The Architecture of Babel, Discourses of Literature and Science, Reading by Starlight, Transrealist Fiction, or even for his recent fascinating book x, y, z, t: Dimensions Of Science Fiction (which, as an aside deserves a Hugo nomination in my opinion) – I don’t know. I do know it’s well deserved. Australia, for all its well-earned reputation for turning out SF academics (think Peter Nicholls, Russell Blackford, Janeen Webb and so on), has not turned out any more distinguished academics than Broderick. Who knows, if he had a blog he might even get a William Atheling nomination. It could happen.

I know the world at large is not wondering about this stuff, but I currently plan to attend Swancon 30 in Perth this weekend, Continuum 3 in Melbourne in July, and World Fantasy Convention 2005 in Madison in November. I think I may be on the program in Melbourne and possibly in Madison (I don’t know). I will be launching daikaiju at lunch time this Saturday, which should be fun too. Don’t know when else I’ll be at Swancon, but I hope to see everyone I can.

John Clute discusses Lisa Tuttle’s new novel, The Mysteries, which ‘echoes to the common sense of professional craft’, and from his description, manages to be a little less than the sum of its parts.

Hmmm…. this would be nice.