Tuesday Letter: Making Waves

Dear Friend and Reader:

I'm taking advantage of a brief lull in the astrological action, prior to the Sun ingressing Virgo tomorrow, to get your input on a project we're doing for our subscribers. We will have the September extended monthly horoscope and overview on Friday, after the Sun is in its new sign.

Now as for the project -- for a few years we've been planning a revamp of the subscriber area, that is, the archive where current and old Planet Waves subscriber editions are kept.

Most of you use the email part of the service; we want to know what would get you excited about visiting the web version.

First, two sentences of Internet history. It's challenging delivering anything by email, since about 99% of all email is spam, and just about everyone uses a spam filter. We knew this would be a challenge even 10 years ago, so we put up a web version of the emails, though it was not designed to be much more.

While the Internet became Disney World or maybe a Buck Rogers universe of in-your-face advertising, we kept archiving our issues faithfully on a humble website we call "drdc8" (because that was how the text translation of a JavaScript password, long forgotten, still appears in the URL). They are all there, going back to January 2003, and every subscriber has access.

We plan to have a beta test of the new area ready this autumn, and we're at the point where we can start to incorporate your ideas.

So my question is, what would you like to see in a web edition of the subscriber service? We know you want individual logins and passwords; we're working on that (it's easier said than done). We are, year by year and week by week, moving each edition over to the new area. Issues will be tagged, categorized and searchable. (If you're fast on Word Press and want to help with that whale of a farm chore, please let me know.) The Oracle will be there as well. Gradually we'll be researching my past writing and building out our basic astrology mini-site.

But -- what else? What would either round out the service, or make it more useful, as a web-based creation?

If you have a suggestion, please let us know. This email address will reach the design team. (If you can't get the link to work, it's notice@planetwaves.net).

Thank you for your suggestions -- and see you Friday with the monthly edition.

Lovingly,