Dear Friend and Reader:

We will have Planet Waves Monthly for you when the Sun goes into Scorpio in a little while. It's our tradition not to issue the new monthly horoscope until the Sun has changed signs.

Meanwhile, I wanted to take a moment and call your attention to our new site navigation features on PlanetWaves.net. For some people, the site has worked beautifully, and for others, the lack of standard navigation controls has made it difficult to work with. So we've addressed this with some basic and hopefully not so distracting tabs on top of our new main pages. These will also appear on mailings, such as this one (see above).

In case this interests you, here's what we've done. This involves the publicly accessible pages. (We will take on the Subscriber Homepage next.) It's an interesting exercise figuring out how to do this best, and it seems to take years to get the hang of.

The Front Page (the homepage of PlanetWaves.net) includes the daily photo and most recent article, feature or news posting. It's where we put the stuff we want to have the highest priority and most visibility for that day. These features will mostly be written by me, or one of our two trusted commentators, Judith Gayle (Political Waves, our news blog) or Steve Bergstein (Psychsound, or civil rights blog). Other writers will be contributing, and we are always open to new writing talent. Note, the photo is updated at about midnight European time, or about 6 pm New York time.

Page Two includes a daily astrology note that I'll be writing most days, which is mirrored on the Subscriber Homepage, and which also includes a quote of the day from the archives. (We are still tinkering with this formula.) Headlines that appear on the Front Page will also appear on Page Two for longer, so if you miss something or take time away from Planet Waves, check and it'll probably be there.

Page Three is a simplified contents page (previously called the What's New page), which gives an overview of our recent presentations and also provides access to the free article archives going back to 2000. It will change less often than pages one and two, and points to some of the major projects we've done the past year or so. A Note with a picture of some cool pipes and a curved mirror tells how the archives are organized. Meanwhile, all prior archives have been left intact! This is so as not to confuse people who are more intuitive and want things to be where they remembered them.

The Horoscopes tab takes you to the free monthly horoscopes page. As a subscriber, you get those materials emailed to you and posted to the Subscriber Homepage about a week or so before they appear on the Horoscopes page.

Any of these main pages is designed to work as a site entry page, and they all interconnect. Please have a look. I think we've done a good job of superimposing the illusion of order over the illusion of chaos.

Subscribers may be interested to know that we've been organizing the 2006 weekly archives ongoing, and will soon have the latest one posted. That can be found here, though you'll need your password to get in.

We hope this issues some concerns we've heard over the years that Planet Waves is is difficult to navigate, while preserving some of the original homegrown, "we're not CNN" feeling of the project.

Thanks for tuning in. Catch you soon with the horoscope.

Yours & truly,

Eric Francis

PS, I thought this article might be of some interest to you.