Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Nautilus Engine re-launch

Although we've never gone away, the Nautilus Engine has now had several incarnations format-wise. We started as a regular ol' website with code and everything (http://www.christianklaver.com/nautilus/) . As none of us are advanced coders, it became a chore to deal with.

Then we became a templated site via Google ( https://sites.google.com/site/rnwrrn/). Easier to handle, but really not easy enough (I mean c'mon! It's the 21st Century for Pete's sake!).

Then we went 100% Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/nautilusengine). This was easy to manage, we could forego our quarterly schedule and post stories as soon as we accepted them, and it allowed an easy way to share links, videos, movie trailers, reader comments, photos, just everything and easily, too.

I thought this was THE answer. But it was a quiet, lonely place. Where did everybody go? It seems that Mr. Zuckerberg's social hub lacked a certain caché. Folks didn't like the look or the feel of it or felt as though being a Facebook entity meant it wasn't real fiction for real readers, because, c'mon, anybody can make a facebook page.

So, here we try another experiment in the formatting of online speculative fiction. A blog format (http://thenautilusengine.blogspot.com/) in the fashion of A Twist of Noir. It is, I hope, a happy compromise between coding (I'm just a blithering idiot there), ease of use, frequency of post-ability, and look, feel, and caché.

I hope you will give this incarnation a chance and enjoy some new fiction. And please feel free to submit your stories of a speculative and short-ish nature. That's what we are here for, after all.

Ron Warren
Editor

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