Free, Cool, and Out of Beta
Free,
Cool, and Out of Beta
Slate
Explorer is out of beta, meaning that it is no longer considered experimental.
It is safe to download--and we strongly urge you to do so without fear. Slate
Explorer is a free little program that makes it easier to find your way around
Slate. It tells you what's in each day's issue; it takes you to the page you
want; and it even fires up your browser for you if you're not online at the
moment. Slate Explorer has been awarded Slate magazine's "Cool Software of the
Month" citation, beating out Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0, among other
products. "It's um, you know, really cool," explained the chairman of the
judges' panel, Slate Software Design Engineer David Milligan. Click here to find out more, and to download Slate Explorer. Just to
clarify what it is, it is 1) free and 2) cool. That's, um, what it is.
Baked
While You Sleep
Our "Today's Papers"
feature, begun three months ago, is a big success. More than 20,000 people have
signed up for e-mail delivery of Today's Papers, and another 8,000 to 10,000
read it every day (six days a week) on the Web. (You can sign up for e-mail
delivery right on the Today's Papers page or by clicking here.) Most of the feedback we get is positive. But we do get
several complaints a week about misspellings, grammatical errors, and so on.
These readers ask: Don't you edit this thing?
The simple, eloquent answer
is: No. Here is why. The author of this feature, Scott Shuger, lives in Los
Angeles. He cannot start work until the next day's papers are posted on the Web
at various times in the evening, and he must have it finished by 3:30 a.m. PDT
so that we can get it posted on our site and delivered to people's e-mail by
early morning on the East Coast. We think Scott does a remarkable job given
these working conditions, and that the hour ought to excuse a few typos and
other minor mistakes. The reason we don't catch them is that the rest of us are
not as dedicated as Scott is, and are not inclined to be up at 3 a.m. six days
a week to edit and proofread Scott's copy.
Scott files his column
directly onto our Web site from his computer in the San Fernando Valley. At a
specified moment, a computer at the company that handles our e-mail delivery
then grabs the copy from our site and mails it to our subscriber list. Except
for Scott himself, the whole process is automated. And we're working on that
loophole.
Meanwhile,
it is every journalist's fantasy to be able to mainline prose directly into a
publication without the interference of an editor. And there aren't many
writers we would trust with this kind of power. But we do trust Scott, a former
naval-intelligence officer and editor of the Washington Monthly . Though
if the typos get any worse, we may need to e-mail him a supply of Seattle's
favorite beverage.
