There are some new major upgrades in terms of content and presentation to bring fresh air into the atmosphere.
The purpose of DS NETS is to gather writing materials on the topic of current events. It is started mostly for personal use to house my impressions about the day-to-day current events in order to 1) improve my writing and 2) improve my knowledge about the world. The site has grown since, and the purpose of the site now includes being mindful of the audience, i.e. being aware that there are other people who might be reading the writings. With that in mind, I have decided to a major upgrade on the design side as well as the content side in order to make this website more accessible for readers. Besides, I love getting hits.
There are two categories of content on the site: News Abstracts and News Comments.
News Abstracts are short writings that focus on the fact of a critical news event. The purpose is to reconstruct the condition of an event by focusing on verified facts surrounding the event. There might be cases where multiple news articles would be used to write a News Abstract, or merely a single article would be used (citations to the news articles will always be provided). The purpose is to establish an event clearly for future references and to understand what is going on better. This makes news reading, on my part, more of an activity than a passive reading. Format-wise, each News Abstracts will be between 150 to 250 words.
News Comments are small essays that are a reflection of my impression on a given news event. It might be a critique on how things are or merely a speculation on how the events move forward. This isn’t completely an editorial per se, because I am not focusing on specific issues but instead focusing on an ongoing event. The purpose is to gather my thoughts on the news event and leave a mark on history to show that I actually paid attention to whatever developments that was going on. Because these writings have multiple components, including a thesis and facts, each News Comments will be between 300 to 500 words.
These are the specific forms of writings that will be posted on this website. It wasn’t to say that I haven’t been following these forms of writings in the past, but I think establishing clear criteria on what is going to be posted on the website will make the writings more consistent and pleasing for the reader.
On the design side, I am redesigning the front page of the website to make readability better for everyone. From font sizes to colors of the elements, all the design aspect of the website will be modified to give a clean, uncluttered environment for reading. Many blogs and news websites are guilty for neglecting this aspect, and bad design is a major turn off for consuming material. The redesigning might take a couple of weeks, but when it’s done, the site will look great.
Finally, I am planning to write three to five articles in a week, but the number of articles might be constrained or expanded by my own schedule. Nevertheless, I will try to be more consistent in terms of writing week after week this year.
