Enfilade

Editor’s Note

October was another record-breaking month for HECAA’s Enfilade, with over 2600 individual visitors and 243 visits from return readers. Both numbers are important. The former points to the site’s ability to attract an ever-widening audience while the latter suggests the degree to which there’s a genuine match between visitors’ interests and the site’s content (it’s encouraging to see continued increases in both numbers). For HECAA members, this means there is a substantial audience for your submissions. So by all means, send in announcements and updates on your work!

Earlier this week, Enfilade was honored with an Amadeus Award from the Official Weblog of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart! Blogs set in the twenty-first century are all well and good, but the potential for historical figures’ uses of digital formats is especially intriguing. One can, for instance, now follow John Quincy Adams on Twitter. I know of no eighteenth-century artists or collectors with equivalent sites, though it’s easy to imagine such a thing (please send in links if you know of any examples). Danke schön, Herr Mozart!

Finally, I’ve included below excerpts from a message from the Great Minds at WordPress.com, the platform on which Enfilade is built. The memo underscores their committment to adapting WordPress sites to viewers’ patterns of use, including mobile devices such as the iPhone and Blackberry (in fact, Enfilade now looks terrific on the former). Thanks again to everyone for reading.

Craig Hanson

New smartphones do a great job with most web sites, but older phones have many problems and may not display anything at all. Today we’re launching a couple of mobile themes that will automatically be displayed when your blog is accessed with a compatible mobile phone. The first theme is a modification of WPtouch and will be displayed to phones with modern web browsers like those on the iPhone and Android phones. The second theme was developed from an older version of the WordPress Mobile Edition and will be displayed to all other mobile devices. Mobile visitors greeted by WPtouch will get easy access to posts, pages, and archives. They’ll get fancy AJAX commenting and post loading. . . .  When viewing your blog on other phones, the focus will be on loading the blog quickly while displaying the important information about your content.