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Site Announcement

Site Update: a great archaeological adventure begins

Here is the first report on the project to restore and enhance 25 years of this website's archives.

Jeffrey Overstreet

• 2 min read
Filed under: Site Announcement • Site Maintenance
Site Update: a great archaeological adventure begins
Like Indiana Jones, I'm treasure hunting, and I care about digging in the right place. [Image from TMD's Raiders of the Lost Ark archive.]

In breaking news so insignificant to the rest of the world that you won’t read about it anywhere but here — I’m renovating this website!

Now that all of the posts I’ve ever published over 25+ years have been transferred to this new platform, I’m dedicated to fulfilling my promise that it will be an improvement, building on and cleaning up what was a site in disrepair. That means I’m descending into the archives like Indiana Jones, anxious about the horrors and embarrassments I might discover there, determined to recover and restore anything that qualifies as treasure. This is all intended to make things better for you, the reader. As Jesus — and, later, Bob Dylan — have exhorted us: “Strenghten the things that remain!”

If we could descend into the archives of this website like Jeff Bridges being drawn into his computer in Tron, this is what I imagine the archives would look like. [Image from TMD's Raiders of the Lost Ark archive.]

And I’m committing to giving you occasional updates on how these enhancements are going, in case you want to track the progress. You won’t typically notice these updates on the home page — except for this introductory post — but if you bookmark the new Overstweets page, you’ll see upcoming reports there, along with other minor posts and links. You might end up discovering things in the site archives you didn’t know were there. You might find yourself revisiting reviews, interviews, and reflections that you’d forgotten about.

Just this week, I’ve been opening up some of the oldest posts in the archives, cleaning out the cobwebs, repairing broken things, proofreading, updating some links to other publications (although many links are so old that the pages they once pointed to don’t exist anymore), and, in some cases, sharpening some of the clumsiest writing. And I’ll continue to do that as time allows, during a busy year of teaching, so long as it doesn’t interfere with the composition of new posts.

If you’re curious, feel free to check out some of these highlights from my restoration efforts so far.

Some of these posts are free for everyone. Others are now available only to paid subscribers. (And be merciful, readers — I was an ambitious writer in those early years, but I had so much more to learn about doing this well.)