A literary trip to South America by allegra
I ran across this Virginia Quarterly Review article Friday night (via kottke.org) about a tiny town in Argentina with a large albino population. Even though I was dead tired and the article was quite long, I read the whole thing, riveted to my chair.
It wasn’t just my recent trip to Argentina that drew me in. A secluded town, genetic anomalies, suspicious locals—there’s nothing not to like about Aicuña. Was this an essay? Fiction? Someone trying to pass off a story as nonfiction? It doesn’t really matter, I’m happy to believe it’s true.
Impressed by the writing and feeling the need to immediately subscribe to VQR, I clicked on a link to the home page and found myself diverted to a map that pinpoints each South America article using Google Earth. (Which distracted me from shelling out money for yet another magazine to sit in a pile on the kitchen table—probably a good thing.)
As a daily participant in the fight for media adaptation to technology, I’m so impressed. This is a great example of what publications should be doing, if somewhat unexpected on a website without an article RSS feed.
Posted: October 7th, 2007 by allegra under allegra, links.
Comments: 2
Comments
Comment from Waldo Jaquith
Time: October 7, 2007, 7:55 pm
Our website is run on a creaky old commercial CMS that was created long before RSS. (Well, that’s not strictly true — RSS existed, and I was generating it on all of my websites. But, say, my *mother* hadn’t heard of RSS yet.) I’ve hacked all of the new features into it that I can, but the codebase is just too sprawling and the permissions too scattered and illogical to have made my efforts at generating a reasonable RSS feed. (You can try it if you like — http://www.vqronline.org/feed/ — but the trio of content encoding types used by our CMS will only allow it to show up in the most tolerant of feed readers.) We’ve spent months evaluating CMSs to move to, and Bricolage is our top candidate now. That’ll provide us with lots of great new CMS-y goodness, not least of which the ability to party like it’s 1999, RSS-style.
Comment from Kevin Morrissey
Time: October 7, 2007, 8:13 pm
Allegra - as the managng editor of VQR, just want to say thanks for the posting. Glad to hear you enjoyed the article and the Google map mashup. It was an inspired idea between our editor and web programmer, but sorry to hear that it distracted you from subscribing ;). As far as an RSS feed, we’re working on that too and hope to be able to offer one soon.
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