Austenfans.com
We’ve had several Alert Janeites write to tell us about Austenfans.com, but unfortunately we have been unable to visit for more than a few moments, as the site does not work on the computer at AustenBlog World Headquarters. The site has been set up by Sourcebooks, which publishes several popular Jane Austen paraliterature titles and other Regency-set novels, and part of the site is dedicated to these books and part to Jane Austen’s novels and film adaptations. Some of the content required registration to view, but they also have the text of Jane’s novels available online, what appears to be an RSS aggregator of Austen-related news, and links to sites of interest and fan forums. We are told that our issues with viewing the site are uncommon, so check it out!
November 20th, 2007 at 5:40 am
It doesn’t really work that well for me either… A pity, because the things that actually do appear on my screen look interesting!
November 20th, 2007 at 8:22 am
I listed this site on my Today blog a few weeks back, even though only a few features are available to non members. I didn’t want to frustrate visitors, so I simply linked to the page where one can join.
November 20th, 2007 at 9:19 am
It seems to work better in Firefox than in IE, at least IE6 (which is on our computers at work). At home I can’t get the site to load at all. Unfortunately I couldn’t spend more than a few minutes on the site at work.
November 20th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
I just find it a little annoying that you have to register to access the information.
November 23rd, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Hi all!
Thanks for the feedback. It’s incredibly helpful!
So first about Internet Explorer. We optimized the site for Safari,IE7 and Firefox. Turns out that IE6 and IE7 are not compatible. We are modifying the design/site over the weekend and hope to be viewable on IE6 next week (I’m being told this weekend but these things always seem to take longer).
I’m sorry about the annoying registration process. We have a lot of things that we’re trying to provide via early access and thought that membership would be a way to make that work. There seem to be two issues here. 1) what’s available without being registered and 2) how cumbersome the registration process itself is. We’ll review both of those separately next week.
Lastly, we’re constantly in the process of changing and updating the site, in part from great feedback like yours. So I would expect us to be changing/developing and adding new content and features through the end of the year. Please let us know what you think or what you’d like. And MANY Thanks to the austenblog team and its readers for posting about us.
Thanks again for the feedback and help.
Dominique (austenfans team member)