Wow, those two months moved quickly. So quickly, in fact, that I almost forgot to update my editor’s letter page. Hopefully someone would have noticed besides me.

As you can see, there are elements of the site that have changed. We have slaved away and hopefully enhanced the user friendliness of our platform while making the search engines find us that much more easily too. It is of course difficult to always strike the correct balance between what we need to offer commercially and what the browser wants to see. Add your enjoyment, our primary focus, into the mix and we are up against a hard task master. If we have succeeded, let us know. If something doesn’t take your fancy, we want to know that too.

As our content channels grow, we will be adding a searchable archive to the site as well. As you read this, there are people converting our entire back catalogue of print mags into the new digital format that you will witness when browsing the site. No easy task and one that isn’t much fun, but it will most certainly bring you the best of the last four years of absolute magazine right to your fingertips.

I am not going to hang around too long, this note, as there are a myriad of details to attend to.  They say that time waits for no man, but the same can be said of technology. As we release new versions of our site, we are already deep into developing the next big step. The change is relentless. The technical guru who puts all this together and I commented in a chat that as fast as we can create and update, the developers are releasing new versions of the software that makes up the backbone of our site.

For that reason, we find that some bits of code from the previous incarnations might linger, spoiling the current platform. If you come across any of these gremlins, please be so kind as to inform us. After all, it is you that we are thinking of when we create the pages in the first place.

Welcome to the all new, all digital absolute magazine.

 

There is an old saying, “better late than never”, but I think it is bogus. It is merely a cover for procrastination or laziness. On the other hand, “good things come to those who wait” is the perfect foil for never getting off the couch and putting your efforts out there to be judged. And I have yet to come across a successful person who was simply born and then sat about until fame and fortune landed in his lap.

Wait one second. One comes to mind: the Dalai Lama. Before everyone gets into a froth about how disrespectful that is, consider his appointment. As tradition dictates, the Buddhists get to choose the successor, the one that will inherit the mantle of expectancy and spiritual guidance of all Buddhists worldwide. It isn’t a random choice, but a considered one. The successor is considered to be the reincarnation of his predecessors. The current Dalai Lama, the one famously snubbed by our adept politicos, was selected at the age of two. So he didn’t really have much time to wait about before his fame found him, nor did he have much choice in the matter.

It hasn’t quite been quite that long for your wait to interact with our new digital offering, but for some of us, we have worked enough hours in the last few months for it to feel like it. Not that the work was a labour. One of love yes, but never a chore. It has been said that if you truly love what you do for a living, your job, you will never work another day in your life. What bunkum. I love working on absolute magazine but it has been a hard slog, no matter which way you slice it.

That said, the offering that we present to you is not the final product. This is what is called the Beta version. For all intents and purposes, and with a little luck, no major changes will happen to the platform as you now witness it. But the site has not been field tested, which we now invite you to do.

By interacting with the site over the next two months, you will be assisting us in ironing out any technical glitches that might occur which spoil your browsing pleasure. If you let us know of them, naturally. If you come across any glaring errors, or little things that niggle, please do not hesitate to contact us about them.

Once the testing period is over, the full site will be made live, with a great launch event, naturally. Once we are in full working mode, the entire back catalogue of all the past absolute magazines will be posted to the site, archived in section order for easier browsing. Our web TV channel will be fully functional and the social network will become a by-invitation-only platform. A-List events will be posted in both the eventlist and the social picture gallery.

So while we are extremely proud of what we have achieved in bringing you this new media platform for absolute magazine, there is a lot more to look forward to. And unfortunately, there is nothing other than to believe it when I say, “Have patience, good things come to those who wait”.

We’re back….