Shipped changes, dated, newest first. The shelves move weekly on their own; this page records changes to the machinery.
Awards bodies, book festivals, writing conferences, fan conventions and story contests had been slipping onto the Recent shelf faster than the judge could remove them. Fifty-two were on the shelves this morning. They are organizations by definition, so the index now reads the name: any address or site title that says festival, conference, convention, symposium, competition, contest, prize or awards is left out, before anything else is judged. A writer whose site calls itself award-winning is unaffected, and so is anyone named Wardle. Eighty-nine sites left today. Nothing is deleted, and a site wrongly caught by its name can be restored by hand, the same as any other mistake here.
Every writer in the index now has a page of their own, linked from the bottom of their card. It says what the index measured and nothing more: how often they post, by month and by year, read from their own dated links; how long they have been at it, against every other writer here; the shape of their site; when the archive first saw them and when we did; the words that are most their own; who vouches for them, in the words they used; and how the machine sees the site, which is the reason search never did. Nothing on the page is quoted from the writing and nothing is written by a model. The writer's own site is the first link on the page.
Every form and subject shelf now opens with a census of that shelf, recounted each morning: where those writers build, when they started, how the index knows they are alive, how they build compared with the other shelves, the words that shelf uses, and who links to whom within it.
Two smaller things. Links out to writers are now followed, so a place on these shelves counts for something in search. And the sitemap dates each page by when it last changed, rather than stamping every page with today.
A site audit found the almanac answering at four addresses for every page: with and without www, with and without a closing slash, and none of them saying which was the real one. Each page now has one address, and the other three send you there. Every shelf also carries its own title and description in place of the homepage's, and a card for links shared in chat or in a feed, so a link to the poetry shelf says it is the poetry shelf when it lands. The crawler page is linked from every footer, and the About page no longer points at a roadmap that has yet to be published.
The mark has been redrawn. The pointing hand and its red full stop are the same idea they were on the day the almanac opened, but the hand now sits reversed out of a solid disc instead of standing on its own. One drawing now serves both the light page and the dark one, and the tab icon no longer needs a red square behind it to stay visible, which returns the red to the single job it does everywhere else on the site: marking the point.
Readers can leave a heart on any writer's card. No account, no cookie; the count appears once a writer reaches three, and the record of which hearts are yours lives in your browser alone. Page views are now counted with every storage permission denied, and the About page explains the whole arrangement. The same day, 79 sites left the index after a new gate concluded they were organizations, presses, or forums. The mission is writers.
A card now claims "publishing since" only when the writer's own feed or sitemap shows the whole archive. Evidence that sees just the recent end of an archive sets no start year. The ranking was also re-judged against fourteen fresh head-to-head comparisons of real writers, and one weight moved.
Feeds and sitemaps now inform how long a writer has been at it, which reaches years that homepage evidence alone never sees. A new gate began challenging sites that read as organizations rather than a person.
The featured shelf is ordered by the almanac's own scorer, and every placement prints its reason on the card. The weights were tuned against hand-judged pairs of real writers and beat both baseline orderings, measured.
A hand-written matcher that runs in your browser. Results are uncapped and paged, and every search offers a path into the catalogue's own shelves.
The first several hundred writers, on four shelves, at longhandalmanac.com.