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One of the features of the New! Improved! LHMP blog on the Alpennia website is the addition of extensive content tags so that visitors can search for specific types of content. But I and my website designers have been brainstorming over how best to make those tags available. The Cadillac version would be a set of additive filters so you could, for example, ask, "What does the LHMP have on 13th century Spain?" However this Cadillac version would take a fair bit of work and I wanted to roll out something in the near term.

So the current solution will be a set of Tag Essays, set up by tag type (Place, Time Period, Person/Event, and Misc.) and sorted out thematically for the larger categories. (And by "larger categories", I note that the Person/Event tag-list has over 500 entries currently, many used only once.)

I'm rolling out the two simplest groups today: Place and Time Period. These are relatively fixed lists. (Though more Place tags will undoubtedly be added over time.) These essays will explain my strategy in tagging entries and provide a full list of the tags currently in that group. The Tag Essays will always be findable on the main LHMP index page, and eventually I'll have navigation links to them on a sidebar as well.

Expect to see the other two categories covered in the next month or so. I'd originally been planning to spend November tackling several books that I picked up at this year's Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, but I've decided to slack off a little, in honor of my usual November travel schedule.

This weekend's website work session includes a few other improvements. Most importantly, the Alpennia blog now has an RSS feed! So add http://alpennia.com/blog/feed to your favorite RSS reader. (And let me know if there are any issues with it, because this is all new to me.) Special Live Journal feature: I've set up the RSS feed right here in Live Journal, so all you have to do is add Alpennia to your friends list!

If you hadn't previously poked around in the tags on the Lesbian Historic Motif Project, you might not have noticed the problems with how the results were displayed. So if you hadn't noticed, just enjoy using tags to search! If you had noticed, it's fixed! The final major improvement is something that users are unlikely to notice much. I've added a comment-management module so that I don't have to manually sort through the flood of comment-spam to find and approve actual reader comments on the blog. Ideally this sould mean that "real comments" will appear immediately, instead of having to wait for approval.

Sorry that this week's LHMP post seems so boring. Trust me, it's all very exciting on my side! And speaking of excitement, remember that Mother of Souls is now available for pre-order at Bella and major online book sources. (E-books will only be available from Bella for the first month or so, but they have all formats DRM-free.) The bigger the splash the book can make at release, the better the chance that new readers will become interested in the series. So I'm counting on all of you to help spread the word about Alpennia.