After a serious behind-the-scenes overhaul Sideshow is now onto version 6. Not everything is done yet, but below is a quick summary of the changes so far.
Magazine / Special Tactics
About this time last year I convinced myself that producing a print/digital magazine would be the way to support Sideshow's future development and activity, and decided to go all-in and plough a lot of time into writing and producing a first edition. It flew like cement off a spade. Some time in the future I'll do a postmortem report for the benefit of future generations — perhaps waiting until I'm 80 and issuing a sort of Robert McNamara ten lessons set to music by Philip Glass — but for now I've put the articles from issues 1 and 2 up on the site, plus made the bundled editions available for download for free. So:
I've taken the digital editions out of Sideshow's market, but if you'd like to buy a print copy of issue 1 and contribute toward the reclamation of my living space + reduce the environmental impact meted out on the inevitable day that I tip the remaining copies into the local canal, then, well, you can do that.
And what of the future magazine?
In terms of past service, reviews will stop – have stopped; features/interviews will continue but start to appear within more granular formats. And then the new thing I want to do with the magazine, and the site as a whole, is use it as a platform to conduct a series of experiments in the overlapping fields of digital art, data journalism, online writing, interactive narrative, and interactive mapping — and in doing so develop a time-intensive, ad hoc working method that takes its inspiration from artistic process. These bigger and more ambitious pieces of writing I want to conceive as self-contained projects, and to undertake in partnership with organisations/companies, crossing the line from editorial writing / journalism into the realm of 'creative services'.
All that's fairly heavy — big, intricate projects. To counteract and leaven that side of the site a little I'm going to be writing very short things under the Correspondence section. I also hope this will replace one of the principal functions of reviewing by documenting at least a slice of contemporary circus' activity internationally; how exactly it will work, and what its voice will be, is something I'll work out as I go.
Maps
Updating the site's mapping module to its Drupal 7 counterpart I lost the grouping and scalepoints which it took so many trials and tears to implement the first time round. Unacceptable!
I switched away from OpenLayers and over to MapBox's glorious and sexy and gloriously sexy Tile Mill. Sideshow's main map is sort of a legacy project now, and I rebuilt it to look and operate pretty much the same as before, but in future I'm going to be doing some mapping projects that experiment with a few of the more advanced features of the toolset. Wts.
Artists Maps / Profiles
I've taken out the artist profile / map facility, partly as a concession to the impossible upgrade path, partly in recognition of the fact that it never worked the way I wanted it to. I haven't deleted the existing accounts or profiles — they're still online, just tucked away a bit.
Account creation is still active because it's tied to the market, but you can't make a profile or do anything 'bout anything. I'm going to keep thinking about this though, and might introduce some additional features down the line.
Market
Looks the same, works pretty much the same, but I switched to a different commerce platform, which meant all the data from the last one is locked up on the old site. Hopefully this isn't a problem for anyone. As noted above the downloadable issues are now free, so you can access them anytime. If for some reason you need/want an additional record of a previous purchase, then e-mail me on john@sideshow-circusmagazine.com and I'll sort it out.
Newsletter
I want to redo this and improve it, and in the meantime I'll be skipping a couple editions. Who cares, it's winter! Normal service resumes in January. If you want to be on the list, sign-up here.
Finally
A lot of the site looks the same as before, but upgrading the CMS (Drupal 6 to 7 — niiiiiiiggghtmaaaaaaarrrre) meant rebuilding nearly everything. I've tried to go through and check that all the pages are displaying correctly and nothing's missing, but if you find an obvious display error (which doesn't go away after clearing your browser cache) or get 404'ed and have a moment to drop me an e-mail about it I'd appreciate the heads up.